LIBRARY 

OF    THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 
Class  ^  5"  2i 


•C 


A  Study  of  Prose  Fiction 

The  Powers  at  Play 

The  Plated  City 

Salem   Kittredge  and  Other  Stories 

The  Broughton  House 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 


The  Amateur  Spirit 


By  Bliss  Perry 


Boston  and  New  York 
Houghton,  Mifflin  and  Company 

(£fte  Ciiticrsi&e  press,  Cambribge 
1904 


COPYRIGHT   1904   BY   BLISS   PERRY 


Published  October  iqo4 


To 
A.  B.  P. 


PREFACE 

THE  half  dozen  essays  that  are  printed  in  this 
volume  have  sufficient  unity,  I  hope,  to  justify 
their  publication  as  a  book.  The  emotions  of  the 
author  who  discovers  that  he  has  produced  a 
treatise  when  he  intended  only  a  series  of  essays 
may  be  likened  to  the  surprise  of  the  child  who 
observes  that  his  blocks,  piled  almost  at  random, 
make  something  that  looks  like  a  castle  after  all. 
My  castle  is  indeed  but  a  modest  one.  Yet  the 
essays  which  make  up  this  volume  have  all  been 
written,  I  find,  with  some  reference  to  the  cen 
tral  theme :  namely,  the  significance  of  the  ama 
teur  spirit  in  carrying  forward  the  daily  work  of 
our  modern  world.  I  have  endeavored  to  illus 
trate  from  many  fields  —  from  sports  and  poli 
tics,  from  science  and  letters  —  the  possibility  of 
combining  the  professional's  skill  with  the  zest 
and  enthusiasm  of  the  amateur. 

The   first   essay   is   devoted   to   that   general 
theme.   The  study  of  Indifferentism  approaches 


viii  PREFACE 

the  subject  from  another  side,  and  one  not  less 
fascinating  to  the  observer  of  human  life.  The 
two  papers  about  the  College  Professor  have 
been  chosen,  partly  because  that  profession  is 
but  little  understood  by  the  general  public,  and 
partly  because  it  frequently  affords  a  very  per 
fect  illustration  of  the  union  of  an  ardent  human 
spirit  with  a  consummate  technical  expertness. 
The  story  of  an  episode  in  Nathaniel  Hawthorne's 
spiritual  development  contributes  something,  I 
think,  to  the  understanding  of  the  fusion  of 
normal  human  interests  and  sympathies  with  the 
purely  artistic  passion  of  the  born  writer.  The 
amateur  and  the  professional  in  Hawthorne  — 
using  both  words  in  their  best  sense  —  may  be 
observed  with  singular  clearness  in  that  critical 
summer  of  1838. 

An  honored  and  friendly  Doctor  of  Divinity 
has  accused  me  of  endeavoring,  in  the  essay  upon 
Fishing  with  a  Worm,  to  write  allegory.  That 
shall  be  as  the  reader  chooses  to  interpret  it ;  but 
I  have  certainly  tried  to  picture  from  the  material 
offered  by  a  favorite  pastime,  some  of  the  warring 
motives  in  the  old  struggle  between  the  generous 
and  the  sordid  ways  of  looking  at  the  world. 


PREFACE  ix 

I  should  add  that  the  essay  on  The  Life  of  a 
College  Professor  originally  appeared  in  Scrib- 
ner's  Magazine.  The  others  have  been  printed 
in  The  Atlantic  Monthly. 

B.  P. 

CAMBRIDGE,  1904. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The  Amateur  Spirit          .         .                '  »         .  1 

Indifferentism      ......  35 

The  Life  of  a  College  Professor        ...  67 

College  Professors  and  the  Public          .         .  93 

Hawthorne  at  North  Adams     .         .         .         .  117 

Fishing  with  a  Worm  .....  141 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

ONE  interesting  result  of  the  British  struggle 
in  South  Africa  was  a  revival  among  English 
men  of  the  spirit  of  self-examination.  The  unex 
pected  duration  and  the  staggering  cost  of  the 
war  brought  sharply  home  to  them  a  realization 
of  national  shortcomings.  When  every  allowance 
was  made  for  the  natural  difficulties  against  which 
the  British  troops  so  gallantly  contended,  there 
remained  a  good  deal  of  incontrovertible  and  un 
welcome  evidence  of  defective  preparation,  of  in 
adequate  training.  The  War  Office  maps  were 
incomplete ;  the  Boer  positions  were  ill  reconnoi 
tred;  British  officers  of  long  experience  were 
again  and  again  outgeneraled  by  farmers.  Of  the 
many  frank  and  manly  endeavors  to  analyze  the 
causes  of  such  a  surprising  weakness,  one  of 
the  most  suggestive  was  made  by  the  Hon.  George 
C.  Brodrick,  Warden  of  Merton  College.  In  an 
article  published  in  1900  he  inquired  whether  his 
countrymen  may  well  be  called,  not,  as  formerly, 


4  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

"  a  nation  of  shopkeepers,"  but,  with  more  justice, 
a  nation  of  amateurs.  "  Conspicuous  as  are  the 
virtues  of  British  soldiers  and  British  officers," 
he  remarks,  "  these  virtues  are  essentially  the  vir 
tues  of  the  amateur,  and  not  of  the  professional, 
arising  from  the  native  vigor  of  our  national  tem 
perament,  and  not  from  intelligent  education  or 
training."  J 

The  distinction  here  made  between  the  ama 
teur  and  the  professional  is  one  that,  for  ordi 
nary  purposes,  is  obvious  enough.  The  amateur, 
we  are  accustomed  to  say,  works  for  love,  and 
not  for  money.  He  cultivates  an  art  or  a  sport, 
a  study  or  an  employment,  because  of  his  taste 
for  it ;  he  is  attached  to  it,  not  because  it  gives 
him  a  living,  but  because  it  ministers  to  his  life. 
Mr.  Joseph  Jefferson,  for  instance,  is  classed  as 
a  professional  actor  and  an  amateur  painter. 
Charles  Dickens  was  an  amateur  actor  and  a 
professional  novelist.  Your  intermittent  polit 
ical  reformer  is  an  amateur.  His  opponent,  the 
"ward  man,"  is  a  professional;  politics  being 
both  his  life  and  his  living,  his  art  and  his  con 
stant  industry. 

1  The  Nineteenth  Century,  October,  1900. 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  6 

In  any  particular  art  or  sport,  it  is  often  diffi 
cult  to  draw  a  hard-and-fast  line  between  amateur 
and  professional  activity.  The  amateur  athlete 
may  be  so  wholly  in  earnest  as  to  take  risks  and 
to  endure  hardships  which  no  amount  of  money 
would  tempt  him  to  undergo.  This  earnestness 
has  seldom,  if  ever,  been  carried  so  far  as  it  is  in 
our  American  athletic  contests  of  the  present  day. 
Here,  for  instance,  is  the  testimony  of  one  of 
the  members  of  the  Oxford-Cambridge  Golfing 
Society's  team,  which  won  so  many  victories  on 
the  American  links  in  the  summer  of  1903 : 

"Apart  from  the  American  phraseology  and 
such  minor  distinctions,  golf  as  played  across 
the  Atlantic  is  fundamentally  different  from  the 
English,  and  more  especially  the  Scotch  variety 
of  the  game.  At  bottom  the  game  in  America  is 
a  business.  At  bottom  the  game  in  England 
is  a  pleasure,  a  relaxation,  and  a  means  of 
taking  pleasant  exercise.  No  doubt  from  its  en 
thralling  nature  golf  in  England  has  devotees  to 
whom  the  game*  is  a  '  pleasure  that 's  all  but  pain,' 
but  even  so,  the  attitude  of  this  minority  is  dif 
ferent  from  the  great  bulk  of  American  players 
who  have  set  golf  upon  such  a  pedestal  that  it 


6  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

has  dominated  them  as  a  '  pain  that  is  almost  a 
pleasure.'  .  .  . 

"  The  whole  attitude  towards  golf  is  one  of 
comparison,  just  as  in  other  branches  of  life. 
The  American  is  intensely  interested  in  the  tall 
est  building,  the  richest  man,  the  longest  street, 
the  fastest  train,  and  a  host  of  other  such  combi 
nations  which  sound  like  exercises  out  of  an  ele 
mentary  German  grammar.  It  is  imagined  that 
there  is  a  list,  at  the  head  of  which  is  the  best 
player,  with  the  rest  below  him  in  descending 
scale  of  efficiency.  .  .  . 

"  The  title  of  champion  does  not  carry  with  it 
honor  and  congratulation,  but  rather  liability  to 
attack  and  disparagement  if  the  holder  does  not 
win  every  single  match  or  competition  in  which 
he  plays.  This  criticism  may  be  important  from 
the  business  point  of  view  of  the  professional,  as 
an  advertisement,  but  it  cannot  possibly  affect  an 
amateur  who  has  nothing  whatever  to  gain  or  lose 
pecuniarily  by  being  champion.  The  principle  is 
to  put  a  man  at  the  head  of  a  list  and  then  tear 
him  down  by  all  available  means.  .  .  .  This  con 
tinual  golf -play  ing  with  an  object  does  away  with 
the  light-hearted  and  cheery  matches  and  four- 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  7 

somes  which  are  the  main  part  of  golf  in  the 
United  Kingdom.  The  game  under  this  treatment 
easily  loses  its  title  to  be  called  a  game,  and  be 
comes  a  serious  proposition,  blighted  with  respon 
sibilities  and  overburdened  with  care.  There  is 
no  relaxation  in  golf  of  this  kind,  but  only  in 
creased  consumption  of  both  physical  and  mental 
energy." l 

And  here  is  a  Harvard  rowing-man  writing 
with  admirable  frankness  in  a  recent  number  of 
The  Harvard  Graduates'  Magazine,  under  the 
title  "  Sport  or  Business  "  :  "I  have  known  but 
one  'Varsity  athlete  (I  refer  particularly  to  foot 
ball  and  rowing  as  the  most  strenuous  branches 
of  our  sport)  who  admitted  for  a  moment  that 
he  went  out  for  the  fun  he  got  from  the  practice 
and  the  contest.  .  .  . 

"  As  the  thing  now  stands  a  man  may  have  the 
best  of  personal  reasons  for  not  playing,  but  if 
he  is  a  good  athlete  his  duty  to  the  college  de 
mands  a  sacrifice  of  these.  The  duty  to  get  Yale 
beaten  is  just  now  reckoned  to  be  the  athlete's  sole 
duty,  while  his  duty  to  his  present  and  future  self 
looms  small  in  the  background,  or  vaguely  in  the 

1  J.  A.  T.  Bramston  in  Golf. 


8  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

middle  distance.  It  is  hard  lines  for  men  who  are 
unable  to  adapt  themselves  to  such  a  perspective, 
and  who  are  made  to  feel  ashamed  of  this  as  of  a 
weakness.  They  bear  indeed  the  '  athlete's  bur 
den/  And  there  are  too  many  such  men,  —  men 
who  thoroughly  dislike  their  work  under  the  pre 
sent  extreme  conditions,  moral  as  well  as  physical, 
and  who  do  it  only  from  a  vague  feeling  that  it  is 
*  up  to  them '  to  stake  their  persons  in  the  gen 
eral  obligation  to  organize  victory. 

"  The  spirit  that  makes  a  man,  when  he  has  once 
undertaken  a  thing,  put  it  through  to  a  finish  and 
win  out  no  matter  what  it  costs  (and  this  was 
once  given  as  a  definition  of  the  Yale  spirit),  is 
an  excellent  maxim  for  business  or  politics,  and 
one  that  is  frequently  heard  in  defense  of  the 
present  teeth-gritting  state  of  affairs  between 
Harvard  and  Yale.  But  such  a  maxim  cannot  be 
applied  to  athletics.  It  means  the  death  of  ath 
letics.  Its  place  is  in  the  prize-ring  or  anywhere 
you  please  save  in  a  branch  of  activity  which  is 
essentially  a  recreation.  The  true  amateur  ath 
lete,  the  true  sportsman,  is  one  who  takes  up  sport 
for  the  fun  of  it  and  the  love  of  it,  and  to  whom 
success  or  defeat  is  a  secondary  matter  so  long  as 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  9 

the  play  is  good.  .  .  .  Rivalry  is  a  vital  element  of 
sport ;  it  is  from  doing  the  thing  well,  doing  the 
thing  handsomely,  doing  the  thing  intelligently 
that  one  derives  the  pleasure  which  is  the  essence 
of  sport.  Even  more  vital  than  the  rivalry  itself 
is  the  checking  of  its  fierceness  and  bitterness  by 
the  graciousness  of  gentlemanly  feeling.  It  must 
be  remembered  that  pure  rivalry  is  fighting,  and 
the  more  its  part  is  magnified  in  sport  the  more 
sport  takes  on  the  nature  of  a  fight,  —  the  nature 
of  the  sport  which  has  come  to  exist  between 
Harvard  and  Yale.  We  have  to  admit  that  there 
are  some  of  us  who  prefer  fighting-fun  to  sport, 
and  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  fighting  is  a  healthy 
discipline ;  but  the  majority  of  us  do  not,  and 
there  is  no  reason  why  our  athletics  should  be 
moulded  to  suit  the  taste  of  the  former,  —  that 
we  should  be  made  to  take  our  fun  with  all  these 
convulsions  and  hysterics.  Yet  just  as  long  as  we 
meet  the  present-day  Yale  such  will  be  the  state 
of  things.  .  .  . 

"  I  am  well  aware  of  the  construction  which 
a  part  of  the  public  would  put  upon  Harvard's 
giving  up  contests  with  Yale.  '  Hopeless  of  vic 
tory,'  it  would  be  repeated,  'and  like  a  sulky 


10  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

child,  she  won't  play ! '  To  make  my  own  mean 
ing  clear  let  me  repeat  that  not  the  loss  of  vic 
tories,  but  fear  of  the  loss  of  the  true  amateur 
spirit  here  would  be  what  would  urge  Harvard  to 
such  a  course.  I  have  rowed  against  Yale  three 
times,  twice  in  minor  crews  which  beat  her,  and 
once  in  a  university  boat  which  she  beat  hand 
somely.  I  should  be  willing  to  see  her  beat  Har 
vard  incessantly  if  the  business  and  hysterical 
elements  of  the  thing  could  be  left  out.  And  for 
these  elements  it  is  by  no  means  fair  to  blame 
Yale  exclusively,  though  her  '  spirit '  is  popularly 
understood  to  include  them.  The  contestants  if 
left  to  themselves  would  not  develop  this  spirit 
to  such  excess.  It  comes  from  outside  pressure, 
from  the  papers,  the  graduates,  the  non-athletic 
undergraduates,  the  crowd  of  betting  toughs  who 
turn  up  at  every  important  game,  and,  in  general, 
the  false  '  friends  of  sport.'  " 1 

The  athletic  contests  of  zealous  undergraduates 
are  of  course  but  one  illustration  of  the  earnest 
ness  which  the  amateur  may  carry  into  every 
department  of  life.  Amateur  philanthropy,  for 

1  William  James,  Jr.,  in  The  Harvard  Graduates1  Magazine, 
December,  1903. 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  11 

example,  is  of  great  and  increasing  service  in 
the  social  organism  of  the  modern  community. 
Many  an  American  brings  to  his  amusement,  his 
avocation,  —  such  as  yachting,  fancy  farming, 
tarpon  fishing,  —  the  same  thoroughness,  energy, 
and  practical  skill  that  win  him  success  in  his 
vocation. 

And  yet,  as  a  general  rule,  the  amateur  betrays 
amateurish  qualities.  He  is  unskillful  because  un 
trained  ;  desultory  because  incessant  devotion  to 
his  hobby  is  both  unnecessary  and  wearisome; 
ineffective  because,  after  all,  it  is  not  a  vital 
matter  whether  he  succeed  or  fail.  The  amateur 
actor  is  usually  interesting,  at  times  delightful, 
and  even,  as  in  the  case  of  Dickens,  powerful ;  his 
performance  gives  pleasure  to  his  friends;  but, 
nevertheless,  the  professional,  who  must  act  well 
or  starve,  acts  very  much  better.  In  a  country 
where  there  is  a  great  leisure  class,  as  the  Warden 
of  Merton  points  out,  amateurism  is  sure  to  flour 
ish.  "  The  young  Englishman  of  this  great  leisure 
class,"  he  says,  "  is  no  dandy  and  no  coward,  but 
he  is  an  amateur  born  and  bred,  with  an  amateur's 
lack  of  training,  an  amateur's  contempt  of  method, 
and  an  amateur's  ideal  of  life."  The  English  boy 


12  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

attends  school,  he  adds,  with  other  boys  who  are 
amateurs  in  their  studies,  and  almost  professionals 
in  their  games ;  he  passes  through  the  university 
with  the  minimum  of  industry ;  he  finds  profes 
sional  and  public  life  in  Great  Britain  crippled 
by  the  amateur  spirit ;  in  the  army,  the  bar,  the 
church,  in  agriculture,  manufacturing,  and  com 
merce,  there  is  a  contempt  for  knowledge,  an  in 
veterate  faith  in  the  superiority  of  the  rule  of 
thumb,  a  tendency  to  hold  one's  self  a  little  above 
one's  work. 

Similar  testimony  has  also  been  given  by  Man- 
dell  Creighton,  the  late  Bishop  of  London,  in  a 
posthumously  published  address  entitled  "  A  Plea 
for  Knowledge."  "  The  great  defect  of  England 
at  present,"  confesses  the  bishop,  "  is  an  inade 
quate  conception  of  the  value  of  knowledge  in 
itself,  and  of  its  importance  for  the  national  life. 
We  have  a  tendency  to  repose  on  our  laurels ;  to 
adopt  the  attitude  that  we  are  no  longer  profes 
sionals,  but  high-minded  and  eclectic  amateurs. 
.  .  .  We  do  not  care  to  sacrifice  our  dignity  by 
taking  undue  care  about  trifles."  1 

With  the  validity  of  such  indictments  against 

1  Contemporary  Review,  April,  1901. 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  13 

a  whole  nation  we  have  no  direct  concern.  But 
they  suggest  the  importance  of  the  distinction  be 
tween  the  amateur  and  the  professional  spirit. 
They  show  that  a  realization  of  this  distinction 
may  affect  many  phases  of  activity,  personal  and 
national.  They  indicate  how  far  reaching  may 
be  its  significance  for  us  Americans  as  we  face 
those  new  conditions  under  which  the  problems 
of  both  personal  and  national  life  must  be  worked 
out. 

Amateurs,  then,  to  borrow  Mr.  Brodrick's 
definition,  "are  men  who  are  not  braced  up  to 
a  high  standard  of  effort  and  proficiency  by  a 
knowledge  that  failure  may  involve  ruin,  who  sel 
dom  fully  realize  the  difficulties  of  success  against 
trained  competitors,  and  who  therefore  rebel 
against  the  drudgery  of  professional  drill  and 
methodical  instruction."  One  may  accept  this 
definition,  in  all  its  implications,  without  ceasing 
to  be  aware  of  the  charm  of  the  amateur.  For 
the  amateur  surely  has  his  charm,  and  he  has  his 
virtues,  —  virtues  that  have  nowhere  wrought 
more  happily  for  him  than  here  upon  American 
soil.  Versatility,  enthusiasm,  freshness  of  spirit, 
initiative,  a  fine  recklessness  of  tradition  and 


14  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

precedent,  a  faculty  for  cutting  across  lots, — 
these  are  the  qualities  of  the  American  pioneer. 
Not  in  the  Italians  of  the  Renaissance  nor  in  the 
Elizabethan  Englishmen  will  one  find  more  plas 
ticity  of  mind  and  hand  than  among  the  plain 
Americans  of  1840.  Take  those  men  of  the  Tran- 
scendentalist  epoch,  whose  individuality  has  been 
fortunately  transmitted  to  us  through  our  litera 
ture.  They  were  in  love  with  life,  enraptured  of 
its  opportunities  and  possibilities.  No  matter  to 
what  task  a  man  set  his  hand,  he  could  gain  a  live 
lihood  without  loss  of  self-respect  or  the  respect  of 
the  community.  Let  him  try  teaching  school,  Emer 
son  would  advise ;  let  him  farm  it  a  while,  drive 
a  tin  peddler's  cart  for  a  season  or  two,  keep 
store,  go  to  Congress,  live  "  the  experimental  life." 
Emerson  himself  could  muse  upon  the  oversold, 
but  he  also  raised  the  best  Baldwin  apples  and 
Bartlett  pears  in  Concord,  and  got  the  highest 
current  prices  for  them  in  the  Boston  market. 
His  friend  Thoreau  supported  himself  by  making 
sand-paper  or  lead  pencils,  by  surveying  farms, 
or  by  hoeing  that  immortal  patch  of  beans ;  his 
true  vocation  being  steadily  that  of  the  philoso 
pher,  the  seeker.  The  type  has  been  preserved, 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  15 

by  the  translucent  art  of  Hawthorne,  in  the 
person  of  Holgrave,  the  daguerreotypist  of  The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables.  Holgrave  was 
twenty-two,  but  he  had  already  been  a  school 
master,  storekeeper,  editor,  peddler,  dentist.  He 
had  traveled  in  Europe,  joined  a  company  of 
Fourierists,  and  lectured  on  mesmerism.  Yet 
"  amid  all  these  personal  vicissitudes,"  Haw 
thorne  tells  us,  "  he  had  never  lost  his  identity. 
He  had  never  violated  the  innermost  man,  but 
had  carried  his  conscience  along  with  him." 

No  doubt  there  is  something  humorous,  to  our 
generation,  in  this  glorification  of  the  Yankee  tin 
peddler.  Yet  how  much  there  is  to  admire  in  the 
vivacity,  the  resourcefulness,  the  very  mobility, 
of  that  type  of  man,  who  was  always  in  light 
marching  order,  and  who,  by  flank  attack  and 
feigned  retreat  and  in  every  disguise  of  uniform, 
stormed  his  way  to  some  sort  of  moral  victory  at 
last!  And  the  moral  victory  was  often  accom 
panied  by  material  victory  as  well.  These  men 
got  on,  by  hook  or  by  crook;  they  asked  no 
favors ;  they  paid  off  their  mortgages,  and  in 
vented  machines,  and  wrote  books,  and  founded 
new  commonwealths.  In  war  and  peace  they  had 


16  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

a  knack  for  getting  things  done,  and  learning  the 
rules  afterward. 

Nor  has  this  restless,  inventive,  querying,  ac 
complishing  type  of  American  manhood  lost  its 
prominence  in  our  political  and  social  structure. 
The  self-made  man  is  still,  perhaps,  our  most  re 
presentative  man.  Native  shrewdness  and  energy 
and  practical  capacity  —  qualities  such  as  the 
amateur  may  possess  in  a  high  degree  —  continue 
to  carry  a  man  very  far.  They  have  frequently 
been  attended  by  such  good  fortune  as  to  make 
it  easy  for  us  to  think  that  they  are  the  only 
qualities  needed  for  success.  Some  of  the  most 
substantial  gains  of  American  diplomacy,  for  in 
stance,  have  been  made  by  men  without  diplomatic 
training.  We  have  seen  within  a  very  few  years 
an  almost  unknown  lawyer,  from  an  insignificant 
city,  called  to  be  the  head  of  the  Department  of 
State,  where  his  achievements,  indeed,  promptly 
justified  his  appointment.  The  case  of  Judge 
Day  is  by  no  means  unique.  The  conduct  of  the 
War  Department  and  the  Navy  has  frequently 
been  intrusted  to  civilians  whose  frank  ignorance 
of  their  new  duties  has  been  equaled  only  by 
their  skill  in  performing  them.  The  history  of 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  17 

American  cabinets  is,  in  spite  of  many  exceptions, 
on  the  whole,  an  apotheosis  of  the  amateur.  It  is 
the  readiest  justification  of  the  tin  peddler  theory, 
—  the  theory,  namely,  that  you  should  first  get 
your  man,  and  then  let  him  learn  his  new  trade  by 
practicing  it.  "  By  dint  of  hammering  one  gets 
to  be  a  blacksmith,"  say  the  French ;  and  if  a 
blacksmith,  why  not  a  postmaster,  or  a  postmaster- 
general,  or  an  ambassador  ? 

The  difficulty  with  this  theory  lies  in  the  temp 
tation  to  exaggerate  it.  Because  we  have  been 
lucky  thus  far,  we  are  tempted  to  proceed  upon 
the  comfortable  conviction  that  if  we  once  find 
our  man,  the  question  of  his  previous  apprentice 
ship  to  his  calling,  or  even  that  of  his  training  in 
some  related  field  of  activity,  may  safely  be  ig 
nored.  The  gambler  is  in  our  blood.  We  like  to 
watch  the  performance  of  an  untried  man  in  a 
responsible  position,  much  as  we  do  the  trotting 
of  a  green  horse.  The  admitted  uncertainty  of  the 
result  enhances  our  pleasure  in  the  experiment. 
In  literature,  just  now,  we  are  witnessing  the  ex 
ploitation  of  the  "  young  writer."  Lack  of  experi 
ence,  of  craftsmanship,  is  actually  counted  among 
a  fledgeling  author's  assets.  The  curiosity  of  the 


18  THE   AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

public  regarding  this  new,  unknown  power  is 
counted  upon  to  offset,  and  more,  the  recognition 
of  the  known  power  of  the  veteran  writer.  Power 
is  indeed  recognized  as  the  ultimate  test  of  merit ; 
but  there  is  a  widespread  tendency  to  overlook 
the  fact  that  power  is  largely  conditioned  upon 
skill,  and  that  skill  depends  not  merely  upon  nat 
ural  faculty,  but  upon  knowledge  and  discipline. 
The  popularity  of  the  "  young  writer  "  is,  in  short, 
an  illustration  of  the  easy  glorification  of  amateur 
qualities  to  the  neglect  of  professional  qualities. 

This  tendency  is  the  more  curious  because  of 
our  pronounced  national  distaste  for  ineffective 
ness.  The  undisguisedly  amateurish  traits  of 
unskillfulness  and  desultoriness  have  not  been 
popular  here.  If  we  have  been  rather  complaisant 
toward  the  jack-of -all-trades,  we  have  never  wholly 
forgotten  that  he  is  "master  of  none."  In  the 
older  New  England  vernacular,  the  village  ne'er- 
do-well  was  commonly  spoken  of  as  a  "  clever  " 
fellow ;  the  adjective  was  distinctly  opprobrious. 
And  indeed,  if  the  connoisseur  is  the  one  who 
knows,  and  the  dilettante  the  one  who  only  thinks 
he  knows,  the  amateur  is  often  the  one  who  would 
like  to  know,  but  is  too  lazy  to  learn.  Accord- 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  19 

ingly,  lie  keeps  guessing,  in  an  easy,  careless, 
"  clever  "  fashion,  which  is  agreeable  enough  when 
no  serious  interests  are  at  stake.  He  has  transient 
affections  for  this  and  that  department  of  thought 
or  activity ;  like  Mr.  Brooke  in  Middlemarch,  he 
has  "  gone  into  that  a  good  deal  at  one  time."  Mr. 
Brooke  is  a  delightful  person  in  fiction,  but  in 
actual  life  a  great  many  Mr.  Brookes  end  their 
career  at  the  town  farm.  Even  this  would  not 
in  itself  be  so  lamentable  a  matter,  if  it  were  not 
in  the  power  of  a  community  of  Mr.  Brookes  to 
create  conditions  capable  of  driving  the  rest  of  us 
to  the  town  farm.  "  Dilettanteism,  hypothesis, 
speculation,  a  kind  of  amateur  search  for  truth, 
—  this,"  says  Carlyle,  "  is  the  sorest  sin." 

The  amateur  search  for  truth  has  always  flour 
ished,  and  is  likely  to  flourish  always,  in  the 
United  States.  That  the  quest  is  inspiriting, 
amusing,  sometimes  highly  rewarded,  one  may 
readily  admit.  But  if  it  promotes  individualism, 
it  also  produces  the  crank.  If  it  brevets  us  all 
as  philosophers,  it  likewise  brands  many  of  us  as 
fools.  Who  does  not  know  the  amateur  economist, 
with  his  "  sacred  ratios,"  or  his  amiable  willing 
ness  to  "  do  something  for  silver  "  ?  The  amateur 


20  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

sociologist,  who  grows  strangely  confused  if  you 
ask  him  to  define  Sociology  ?  Popular  preachers, 
who  can  refute  Darwin  and  elucidate  Jefferson 
"while  you  wait,"  —  if  you  do  wait?  Amateur 
critics  of  art  and  literature,  who  have  plenty  of 
zeal,  but  no  knowledge  of  standards,  no  anchorage 
in  principles?  The  lady  amateur,  who  writes 
verses  without  knowing  prosody,  and  paints  pic 
tures  without  learning  to  draw,  and  performs  what 
she  calls  "  social  service  "  without  training  her 
own  children  either  in  manners  or  religion  ?  Nay, 
are  there  not  amateur  teachers  who  walk  grace 
fully  through  the  part,  but  add  neither  to  the  do 
main  of  human  knowledge  nor  to  the  practical 
efficiency  of  any  pupil  ? 

But  the  roll-call  of  these  dependents  and  defec 
tives  is  long  enough.  The  failures  of  the  amateur 
search  for  truth  are  often  brilliant  failures.  Its 
occasional  successes  have  often  been  brilliant,  too. 
Yet  the  real  workaday  progress,  the  solid  irre 
traceable  advance  in  any  art  or  profession,  has 
commonly  been  made  by  the  professional.  He 
sums  up  in  himself  both  connoisseurship  and 
craftsmanship.  He  not  only  knows,  but  does. 
Pasteur  was  a  professional,  and  Helmholtz,  and 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  21 

Huxley.  John  Marshall  was  a  professional  jurist. 
Mr.  John  Sargent  is  a  professional  painter  of  por 
traits,  and  Mr.  Secretary  Hay  is  a  professional 
diplomatist. 

If  the  gifted  amateur  desires  to  learn  his  rela 
tive  rank  when  compared  with  a  professional,  the 
way  is  easy.  Let  him  challenge  the  professional ! 
Play  a  match  at  golf  against  the  dour  Scotchman 
who  gives  lessons  for  his  daily  bread.  He  will 
beat  you,  because  he  cannot  afford  not  to  beat 
you.  Shoot  against  your  guide  in  the  North 
Woods.  You  will  possibly  beat  him  at  a  target, 
but  he  will  hit  the  deer  that  you  have  just  missed ; 
you  can  cast  a  fly  on  the  lawn  much  farther  than 
he,  but  he  will  take  more  fish  out  of  the  pool.  It 
is  his  business,  your  recreation.  Some  one  dear 
to  you  is  critically  ill.  It  seems  cruel  to  surrender 
the  care  of  the  sick  person  to  a  hireling,  when  you 
are  conscious  of  boundless  love  and  devotion. 
But  your  physician  will  prefer  the  trained  nurse, 
because  the  trained  nurse  will  do  what  she  is  told, 
will  keep  cool,  keep  quiet,  count  the  drops  accu 
rately,  read  the  thermometer  right ;  because,  in 
short,  he  can  depend  upon  a  professional,  and  can 
not  depend  upon  an  amateur. 


22  THE  AMATEUR   SPIRIT 

What  is  true  of  the  sport,  of  the  art,  is  even 
more  invariably  true  in  the  field  of  scientific  ef 
fort.  How  secure  is  the  course  of  the  Fachmann^ 
who  by  limiting  his  territory  has  become  lord  of 
it,  who  has  a  fund  of  positive  knowledge  upon  all 
the  knowable  portions  of  it,  and  has  charted,  at 
least,  the  deepening  water  where  knowledge  sheers 
off  into  ignorance !  It  is  late  in  the  day  to  con 
fess  the  indebtedness  of  our  generation  to  the 
scientific  method.  How  tonic  and  heartening,  in 
days  of  dull  routine,  has  been  the  example  of 
those  brave  German  masters  to  whom  our  Ameri 
can  scholarship  owes  so  much !  What  industry 
has  been  theirs,  what  confidence  in  method,  what 
serene  indifference  to  the  rivalry  of  the  gifted 
amateur !  I  recall  the  fine  scorn  with  which  Bern- 
hard  ten  Brink,  at  Strassburg,  used  to  wave  aside 
the  suggestions  of  his  pupils  that  this  or  that 
new  and  widely  advertised  book  might  contain 
some  valuable  contribution  to  his  department. 
"  Nay,"  he  would  retort,  "  wissenschaftliche  Be- 
deutung  hat 's  dock  nicht."  Many  a  pretentious 
book,  a  popular  book,  even  a  very  useful  book, 
was  pilloried  by  that  quiet  sentence,  "  It  has  no 
scientific  significance."  To  get  the  import  of  that 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  23 

sentence  thoroughly  into  one's  head  is  worth  all 
it  costs  to  sit  at  the  feet  of  German  scholars. 
There  speaks  the  true,  patient,  scientific  spirit, 
whose  service  to  the  modern  man  was  perhaps 
the  most  highly  appraised  factor  when  we  of  the 
western  world  tried  to  take  an  inventory  of  our 
selves  and  our  indebtedness,  at  the  dawn  of  the 
twentieth  century. 

For  to  be  able  to  assess  the  scientific  bearing 
of  the  new  book,  the  new  fact,  upon  your  own 
profession  proves  you  a  master  of  your  profes 
sion.  Modern  competitive  conditions  are  making 
this  kind  of  expert  knowledge  more  and  more 
essential.  The  success  of  German  manufactur 
ing  chemists,  for  example,  is  universally  acknow 
ledged  to  be  due  to  the  scientific  attainments  of 
the  thousands  of  young  men  who  enter  the  manu 
factories  from  the  great  technical  schools.  The 
alarm  of  Englishmen  over  the  recent  strides  of 
Germany  in  commercial  rivalry  is  due  to  a  dawn 
ing  recognition  of  the  efficacy  of  knowledge,  and 
of  the  training  which  knowledge  recommends.  It 
is  the  well-grounded  alarm  of  the  gifted  amateur 
when  compelled  to  compete  with  the  professional. 
The  professional  may  not  be  a  wholly  agreeable 


24  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

antagonist ;  he  may  not  happen  to  be  a  "  club- 
able  "  person ;  but  that  fact  does  not  vitiate  his 
record.  His  record  stands. 

Is  it  possible  to  explain  this  patent  or  latent 
antagonism  of  the  amateur  toward  the  profes 
sional  ?  It  is  explicable,  in  part  at  least,  through 
a  comparison  not  so  much  of  their  methods  of 
work  —  where  the  praise  must  be  awarded  to  the 
professional  —  as  of  their  characteristic  spirit. 
And  here  there  is  much  more  to  be  said  for  the 
amateur.  The  difference  will  naturally  be  more 
striking  if  we  compare  the  most  admirable  trait 
of  the  amateur  spirit  with  the  least  admirable 
trait  of  the  professional  spirit. 

The  cultivated  amateur,  who  touches  life  on 
many  sides,  perceives  that  the  professional  is  apt 
to  approach  life  from  one  side  only.  It  is  a  com 
monplace  to  say  that  without  specialized  training 
and  accomplishment  the  road  to  most  kinds  of 
professional  success  is  closed.  Yet,  through  bend 
ing  one's  energies  unremittingly  upon  a  particu 
lar  task,  it  often  happens  that  creation  narrows 
"in  man's  view,"  instead  of  widening.  Your 
famous  expert,  as  you  suddenly  discover,  is  but  a 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  25 

segment  of  a  man,  —  overdeveloped  in  one  direc 
tion,  atrophied  in  all  others.  His  expertness,  his 
professional  functioning,  so  to  speak,  is  of  indis 
putable  value  to  society,  but  he  himself  remains 
an  unsocial  member  of  the  body  politic.  He  has 
become  a  machine,  —  as  Emerson  declared  so 
long  ago,  "  a  thinker,  not  a  man  thinking."  He 
is  uninterested,  and  consequently  uninteresting. 
Very  possibly  it  may  not  be  the  chief  end  of  man 
to  afford  an  interesting  spectacle  to  the  observer. 
And  yet  so  closely  are  we  bound  together  that 
a  loss  of  sympathy,  of  imagination,  of  free  and 
varied  activity,  soon  insulates  the  individual,  and 
lessens  his  usefulness  as  a  member  of  society. 
Surely  we  are  playing  an  interesting  comedy, 
here  between  heaven  and  the  mire,  and  we  ought 
to  play  it  in  an  interested  way.  We  can  afford 
to  be  human.  Scientific  Method  is  a  handmaiden 
whose  services  have  proved  indispensable.  No  one 
can  fill  her  place.  We  should  raise  her  wages. 
But,  after  all,  Personality  is  the  mistress  of  the 
house.  Method  must  be  taught  to  know  her  sta 
tion,  and 

"  She  is  the  second,  not  the  first." 

No  doubt  there  is  a  temptation,  in  such  a  com- 


26  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

parison  of  qualities  and  gifts,  to  dally  with  mere 
abstractions.  None  of  us  have  known  a  wholly 
methodized,  mechanicalized  man.  But  none  the 
less  we  may  properly  endeavor  to  measure  a  ten 
dency,  and  to  guard  against  its  excess.  There  are 
few  observers  of  American  life  who  believe  that 
specialization  has  as  yet  been  carried  too  far. 
Yet  one  may  insist  that  the  theory  of  specialized 
functions,  necessitated  as  it  is  by  modern  condi 
tions,  and  increasingly  demanded  as  it  must  be 
while  our  civilization  grows  in  complexity,  needs 
examination  and  correction  in  the  interests  of 
true  human  progress.  It  is  not  that  we  actually 
meet  on  the  sidewalk  some  scientific  Franken 
stein,  some  marvelously  developed  special  faculty 
for  research  or  invention  or  money-making,  which 
dominates  and  dwarfs  all  other  faculties,  — 
though  we  often  see  something  that  looks  very 
much  like  it.  It  is  rather  that  thoughtful  people 
are  compelled  to  ask  themselves,  How  far  can 
this  special  development  —  this  purely  profes 
sional  habit  of  mind  —  proceed  without  injury 
to  the  symmetry  of  character,  without  impairing 
the  varied  and  spontaneous  and  abundant  play  of 
human  powers  which  gives  joy  to  life  ?  And  the 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  27 

prejudice  which  the  amateur  feels  toward  the 
professional,  the  more  or  less  veiled  hostility  be 
tween  the  man  who  does  something  for  love 
which  another  man  does  for  money,  is  one  of 
those  instinctive  reactions  —  like  the  vague  alarm 
of  some  wild  creature  in  the  woods  —  which  give 
a  hint  of  danger. 

Let  us  make  the  very  fullest  acknowledgment 
of  our  debt  to  the  professional  spirit.  Many  of 
our  best  inheritances,  such  as  our  body  of  law, 
represent  the  steady  achievements  of  professional 
skill,  professional  self-sacrifice.  The  mechanical 
conveniences  and  equipments  in  which  the  age 
abounds,  all  this  apparatus  for  communication 
and  transportation,  have  been  wrought  out  for 
us  by  the  most  patient,  the  most  concentrated  ac 
tivity  of  professionals.  The  young  man  who  is 
entering  medicine,  the  law,  business,  the  army, 
the  church,  finds  himself  ranked  at  once  by  his 
power  to  assimilate  the  professional  experience  of 
older  men.  Some  day,  let  us  trust,  the  young  man 
who  desires  to  serve  his  country  in  her  civil  ser 
vice,  her  consular  and  diplomatic  service,  will  find 
himself,  not  as  now,  blocked  by  an  amateurish 
system  of  rewards  for  partisan  fealty,  but  upon 


28  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

the  road  to  a  genuine  professional  career.  The 
hope  of  society,  no  doubt,  depends  largely  upon 
those  men  who  are  seriously  devoting  their  en 
ergies  to  some  form  of  expert  activity.  They 
are  the  torch-bearers,  the  trained  runners  who 
bear  the  light  from  stage  to  stage  of  the  heaven- 
beholden  course.  And  at  least  in  the  immediate 
future  the  necessity  for  unwearying  professional 
endeavor  will  be  more  pressing  than  ever  before 
in  the  history  of  the  world. 

"  Cities  will  crowd  to  its  edge 
In  a  blacker  incessanter  line ; 
.  .  .  The  din  will  be  more  on  its  banks, 
Denser  the  trade  on  its  stream." 

Ours  must  be,  not  "a  nation  of  amateurs," 
but  a  nation  of  professionals,  if  it  is  to  hold  its 
own  in  the  coming  struggles,  —  struggles  not 
merely  for  commercial  dominance,  but  for  the 
supremacy  of  political  and  moral  ideals.  Our 
period  of  national  isolation,  with  all  it  brought 
of  good  or  evil,  has  been  outlived.  The  new 
epoch  will  place  a  heavy  handicap  upon  igno 
rance  of  the  actual  world,  upon  indifference  to 
international  usages  and  undertakings,  upon  con 
tempt  for  the  foreigner.  "What  is  needed  is,  in- 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  29 

deed,  knowledge,  and  the  skill  that  knowledge 
makes  possible.  The  spirit  with  which  we  con 
front  the  national  tasks  of  the  future  should  have 
the  sobriety,  the  firmness,  the  steady  effectiveness, 
which  we  associate  with  the  professional. 

Yet  is  it  not  possible,  while  thus  acknowledg 
ing  and  cultivating  the  professional  virtues,  to 
free  ourselves  from  some  of  the  grosser  faults  of 
the  mere  professional  ?  The  mere  professional's 
cupidity,  for  instance,  his  low  aim,  his  time-serv 
ing,  his  narrowness,  his  clannish  loyalty  to  his 
own  department  only  ?  How  often  he  lacks  im 
agination  !  How  indifferent  he  may  show  himself 
to  the  religious  and  moral  passion,  to  the  dreams, 
hopes,  futilities,  regrets  of  the  breathing,  bleed 
ing,  struggling  men  and  women  by  his  side !  It 
is  not  the  prize-fighter  only  who  brings  profession 
alism  into  disrepute.  The  jockey  who  "pulls"  a 
horse,  the  oarsman  who  "  sells  "  a  race,  the  bicy 
clist  who  fouls  a  rival,  are  condemned  even  by  a 
mob  of  "  sporting  men."  But  the  taint  of  profes 
sionalism  clings  also  to  the  business  man  who  can 
think  only  of  his  shop,  the  scholar  who  talks 
merely  of  letters,  the  politician  who  asks  of  the 
proposed  measure,  "  What  is  there  in  this  for 


30  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

me  f "  To  counteract  all  such  provinciality  and 
selfishness,  such  loss  of  the  love  of  honor  in  the 
love  of  gain,  one  may  rightly  plead  for  some 
breath  of  the  spirit  of  the  amateur,  the  amator, 
the  "  man  who  loves ; "  the  man  who  works  for 
the  sheer  love  of  working,  plays  the  great  com 
plicated  absorbing  game  of  life  for  the  sake  of 
the  game,  and  not  for  his  share  of  the  gate 
money ;  the  man  who  is  ashamed  to  win  if  he 
cannot  win  fairly,  —  nay,  who  is  chivalric  enough 
to  grant  breathing-space  to  a  rival,  whether  he 
win  or  lose ! 

Is  it  an  impossible  ideal,  this  combination  of 
qualities,  this  union  of  the  generous  spirit  of  the 
amateur  with  the  method  of  the  professional? 
In  the  new  world  of  disciplined  national  endeavor 
upon  which  we  are  entering,  why  may  not  the  old 
American  characteristics  of  versatility,  sponta 
neity,  adventurousness,  still  persist?  These  are 
the  traits  that  fit  one  to  adjust  himself  readily  to 
unforeseen  conditions,  to  meet  new  emergencies. 
They  will  be  even  more  valuable  in  the  future 
than  in  the  past,  if  they  are  employed  to  supple 
ment,  rather  than  to  be  substituted  for,  the  solid 
achievements  of  professional  industry.  If  we  are 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  31 

really  to  lead  the  world's  commerce,  —  though 
that  is  far  from  being  the  only  kind  of  leadership 
to  which  American  history  should  teach  us  to  as 
pire,  —  it  will  be  the  Yankee  characteristics,  plus 
the  scientific  training  of  the  modern  man,  that 
will  enable  us  to  do  it.  The  personal  enthusiasm, 
the  individual  initiative,  the  boundless  zest,  of 
the  American  amateur  must  penetrate,  illuminate, 
idealize,  the  brute  force,  the  irresistibly  on-sweep 
ing  mass,  of  our  vast  industrial  democracy. 

The  best  evidence  that  this  will  happen  is  the 
fact  that  it  is  already  happening.  There  are 
here  and  there  amateurs  without  amateurishness, 
professionals  untainted  by  professionalism.  Many 
of  us  are  fortunate  enough  to  recognize  in  some 
friend  this  combination  of  qualities,  this  union  of 
strict  professional  training  with  that  free  outlook 
upon  life,  that  human  curiosity  and  eagerness, 
which  are  the  best  endowment  of  the  amateur. 
Such  men  are  indeed  rare,  but  they  are  prized  ac 
cordingly.  And  one  need  hardly  say  where  they 
are  most  likely  to  be  found.  It  is  among  the 
ranks  of  those  who  have  received  a  liberal  edu 
cation.  Every  higher  institution  of  learning  in 


32  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

this  country  now  offers  some  sort  of  specialized 
training.  To  win  distinction  in  academic  work  is 
to  come  under  the  dominion  of  exact  knowledge, 
of  approved  methods.  It  means  that  one  is  disci 
plined  in  the  mechanical  processes  and  guided  by 
the  spirit  of  modern  science,  no  matter  what  his 
particular  studies  may  have  been.  The  graduates 
whose  acquisitions  can  most  readily  be  assessed 
are  probably  the  ones  who  have  specialized  most 
closely, who  have  already  as  undergraduates  begun 
to  fit  themselves  for  some  form  of  professional 
career.  They  have  already  gained  something  of 
the  expert's  solid  basis  of  accurate  information, 
the  expert's  sureness  of  hand  and  eye,  the  ex 
pert's  instinct  for  the  right  method. 

But  this  professional  discipline  needs  temper 
ing  by  another  spirit.  The  highest  service  of  the 
educated  man  in  our  democratic  society  demands 
of  him  breadth  of  interest  as  well  as  depth  of 
technical  research.  It  requires  unquenched  ardor 
for  the  best  things,  spontaneous  delight  in  the 
play  of  mind  and  character,  a  many-sided  respon 
siveness  that  shall  keep  a  man  from  hardening 
into  a  mere  high-geared  machine.  It  is  these 
qualities  that  perfect  a  liberal  education  and 


THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT  33 

complete  a  man's  usefulness  to  his  generation. 
Taken  by  themselves,  they  fit  him  primarily  for 
living,  rather  than  for  getting  a  living.  But  they 
are  not  to  be  divorced  from  other  qualities ;  and 
even  if  they  were,  the  educated  American  can 
get  a  living  more  easily  than  he  can  learn  how  to 
live.  The  moral  lessons  are  harder  than  the  in 
tellectual,  and  faith  and  enthusiasm,  sympathy 
and  imagination,  are  moral  qualities. 

Here,  for  example,  is  some  young  scholar  who 
has  been  taught  the  facts  of  history,  trained  to 
sift  historical  evidence,  to  compare  historical 
periods,  to  trace  historical  causes;  but  has  he 
imagination  enough  to  see  into  the  mind  and 
heart  of  the  historical  man  ?  He  has  been  taught 
to  analyze  the  various  theories  of  society  and 
government ;  he  has  learned  to  sneer  at  what  he 
calls  "  glittering  generalities ;  "  yet  has  he  sym 
pathy  enough,  moral  passion  enough,  to  under 
stand  what  those  glittering  generalities  have  done 
for  the  men  and  the  generations  that  have  been 
willing  to  die  for  them?  Such  secrets  forever 
elude  the  cold  heart  and  the  calculating  brain. 
But  they  are  understood  by  the  generous  youth, 
by  the  man  who  is  brave  enough  to  take  chances, 


34  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

to  risk  all  for  the  sake  of  gaining  all.  It  is  for 
this  reason  that  the  amateur  football  game,  for  all 
its  brutalities,  has  taught  many  a  young  scholar 
a  finer  lesson  than  the  classroom  has  taught  him, 
namely,  to  risk  his  neck  for  his  college ;  yet  no 
finer  one  than  the  classroom  might  afford  him  if 
his  teacher  were  always  an  amator,  —  a  lover  of 
virility  as  well  as  of  accuracy ;  a  follower  not  of 
the  letter  only,  but  of  the  spirit  which  makes 
alive.  "  Our  business  in  this  world,"  said  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  —  a  craftsman  who  through  all 
his  heart-breaking  professional  toil  preserved  the 
invincible  gayety  of  the  lover,  —  "  is  not  to  suc 
ceed,  but  to  continue  to  fail  in  good  spirits." 
In  this  characteristically  Stevensonian  paradox 
there  is  a  perfect  and  a  very  noble  expression  of 
the  amateur  spirit.  He  does  not  mean,  we  may 
be  sure,  that  failure  is  preferable  to  success,  but 
that  more  significant  than  either  success  or  fail 
ure  is  the  courage  with  which  one  rides  into  the 
lists.  It  is  his  moral  attitude  toward  his  work 
which  lifts  the  workman  above  the  fatalities  of 
time  and  chance,  so  that,  whatever  fortune  befall 
the  labor  of  his  hands,  the  travail  of  his  soul 
remains  undefeated  and  secure. 


INDIFFERENTISM 


INDIFFERENTISM 

READERS  of  books  have  sometimes  debated  the 
question,  "  What  was  the  greatest  book  produced 
during  the  eighteenth  century  ?  "  Was  it  Goethe's 
Faust,  or  Jonathan  Edwards  on  the  Freedom  of 
the  Will  ?  Was  it  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall, 
or  that  romance  of  Fielding's  which  Gibbon  de 
clared  would  "  outlive  the  palace  of  the  Escurial, 
and  the  imperial  eagle  of  the  house  of  Austria  "  ? 
It  is  hard  to  answer  such  a  question,  and  very 
likely  it  is  foolish  to  try.  An  easier  task  is  to 
name  the  wittiest  book  of  that  century.  One  may 
do  so  without  much  fear  of  contradiction.  The 
wittiest  eighteenth-century  book,  surely,  —  al 
though  Wordsworth  does  call  it,  and  in  The  Ex 
cursion  at  that,  a 

"  dull  product  of  a  scoffer's  pen," 

and  Hawthorne  once  fell  asleep  over  it, — is  Vol 
taire's  Candide,  or  Optimism.  Written  in  1759 
to  satirize  the  doctrine  that  ours  is  the  best  of 


38  THE  AMATEUR   SPIRIT 

all  possible  worlds,  Candide  presents,  in  the  form 
of  a  swiftly  moving  story,  Voltaire's  impression 
of  the  world  as  it  really  is.  He  exiles  his  young 
hero  Candide  —  "a person  of  the  most  unaffected 
simplicity"  —  from  his  native  castle  in  West 
phalia,  separates  him  from  his  beloved  mistress 
Cunegunde,  and  sends  him  over  Europe  and  Amer 
ica  to  seek  for  her  and  incidentally  to  observe 
our  mortal  situation.  Candide  is  accompanied 
by  an  old  philosopher  named  Martin,  who  has 
long  served  as  a  bookseller's  hack  and  has  lost  all 
illusions.  As  they  pass  from  one  European  capi 
tal  to  another,  Candide  still  maintains  in  spite  of 
every  disappointment  and  misfortune  that  "  there 
is  nevertheless  some  good  in  the  world." 

"  Maybe  so,"  says  Martin,  "  but  it  has  escaped 
my  knowledge." 

Reasoning  thus,  they  arrive  at  last  at  Venice, 
where  they  hear  much  talk  about  a  certain  noble 
Venetian,  Signor  Pococurante,  whose  name  signi 
fies  "  The-Man-who-cares-little,"  and  who  is  said 
to  be  a  perfectly  happy  man. 

"  I  should  be  glad  to  meet  so  extraordinary  a 
being,"  says  Martin,  and  accordingly  our  travel 
ers  pay  a  visit  to  the  noble  Pococurante.  They 


INDIFFERENTISM  39 

find  him  dwelling  in  a  palace  on  the  Brenta.  Its 
gardens  are  elegantly  laid  out  and  adorned  with 
statues.  The  master  of  the  palace  is  a  man  of 
sixty,  rich,  cultivated,  bored.  He  shows  the  trav 
elers  his  collection  of  paintings,  among  them 
some  by  Raphael.  "  I  have  what  is  called  a  fine 
collection,"  he  admits,  "  but  I  take  no  manner  of 
delight  in  them."  He  orders  a  concert  for  his 
guests,  but  confesses  that  he  himself  finds  the 
music  tiresome.  After  dinner  they  repair  to  the 
library,  where  Candide,  observing  a  richly  bound 
Homer,  commends  the  noble  Venetian's  taste. 

"  Homer  is  no  favorite  of  mine,"  answers  Po 
cocurante  coolly ;  "  I  was  made  to  believe  once 
that  I  took  a  pleasure  in  reading  him.  ...  I 
have  asked  some  learned  men  whether  they  are 
not  in  reality  as  much  tired  as  myself  with  read 
ing  this  poet.  Those  who  spoke  ingenuously 
assured  me  that  he  had  made  them  fall  asleep, 
and  yet  that  they  could  not  well  avoid  giving 
him  a  place  in  their  libraries." 

The  conversation  shifts  to  Virgil,  Horace, 
Cicero ;  to  the  Memoirs  of  the  Academy  of  Sci 
ences,  to  the  drama,  to  English  politics,  and 
finally  to  Milton ;  but  Signor  Pococurante  finds 


40  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

in  all  these  subjects  little  or  nothing  to  praise. 
Candide  the  optimist  is  grieved.  He  has  been 
taught  to  respect  Homer  and  is  fond  of  Milton. 

"  Alas,"  he  whispers  to  Martin,  "  I  am  afraid 
this  man  holds  our  German  poets  in  great  con 
tempt." 

"  There  would  be  no  such  great  harm  in  that," 
replies  Martin. 

"  Oh,  what  a  surprising  man !  "  exclaims  Can 
dide  to  himself.  "  What  a  prodigious  genius  is 
this  Pococurante !  Nothing  can  please  him." 

After  finishing  their  survey  of  the  library, 
they  go  down  into  the  garden.  Candide  politely 
says  something  in  praise  of  its  beauty. 

"  It  is  laid  out  in  bad  taste,"  replies  Pococu 
rante  ;  "  it  is  childish  and  trifling ;  but  I  shall 
have  another  laid  out  to-morrow  upon  a  nobler 
plan." 

At  last  the  two  travelers  take  leave  of  their 
host.  "  Well,"  says  Candide  to  Martin,  "  I  hope 
you  will  own  that  this  man  is  the  happiest  of  all 
mortals,  for  he  is  above  everything  he  possesses." 

"  But  do  you  not  see,"  answers  Martin,  "  that 
he  likewise  dislikes  everything  he  possesses  ?  It 
was  an  observation  of  Plato  long  since  that  those 


INDIFFERENTISM  41 

are  not  the  best  stomachs  that  reject,  without 
distinction,  all  sorts  of  food." 

"  True,"  says  Candide,  "  but  still  there  must 
certainly  be  a  pleasure  in  criticising  everything, 
and  in  perceiving  faults  where  others  think  they 
see  beauties." 

"  That  is"  retorts  Martin,  who  generally  has 
the  last  word,  "  there  is  a  pleasure  in  having  no 
pleasure" 

Few  pages  of  imaginative  literature  are  more 
admirably  written  than  these  whose  bare  out 
lines  I  have  been  copying.  No  group  of  inquirers 
concerning  the  intellectual  habits  and  the  moral 
hopes  of  mankind  is  more  skillfully  composed 
than  that  formed  by  the  three  men  who  saunter 
through  the  library  and  garden  of  this  palace 
upon  the  Brenta:  Candide  the  puzzled  young 
optimist,  old  Martin  the  pessimist,  grimly  de 
lighted,  and  Pococurante  the  indifferentist,  with 
his  perfect  courtesy,  his  refreshing  frankness, 
his  infinite  capacity  for  being  bored.  In  this 
last  personage,  particularly,  there  is  something 
which  touches  the  fancy,  provokes  curiosity,  and 
possibly,  in  spite  of  all  disapprobation  of  the 


42  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

noble  Venetian's  faults,  invites  to  a  closer  ac 
quaintance.  One  may  venture  therefore  to  con 
sider  the  type  of  mind  which  the  Venetian  senator 
represents,  and  to  discuss,  in  their  bearing  upon 
the  life  of  the  modern  man,  some  of  the  old  and 
new  forms  of  indifferentism. 

For  Signor  Pococurante  is  by  no  means  a 
mere  clever  invention  of  Voltaire's.  We  have 
met  the  gentleman  before.  The  type  is  older 
than  the  eighteenth  century ;  older  than  the 
Horatian  doctrine  of  nil  admirari ;  older  even 
than  the  Hebrew  king  who,  like  the  Venetian 
senator,  had  his  men-singers  and  women-singers, 
his  banquets  and  palaces  and  pleasure-gardens, 
and  grew  tired  of  them  all.  The  weariness  of 
the  mind  in  full  possession  of  its  treasures,  as 
that  of  the  body  surfeited  with  its  pleasures,  is  a 
familiar  fact  in  human  history.  Pococurantism 
—  the  caring  little  for  things  that  are  worth 
caring  much  for  —  lurks  deep  in  human  nature. 
But  there  are  certain  conditions  that  bring  the 
seed  of  it  to  full  flowering.  Every  cultivated 
circle  of  men  and  women,  every  highly  organized 
society,  has  its  Pococurantes ;  nay,  there  is  some 
drop  of  their  blood  in  all  of  us  who  have  had 


INDIFFERENTISM  43 

free  access  to  the  fine  excitements  of  the  senses, 
to  the  wide  interests  of  the  mind.  Once  liberate 
a  man  through  education  and  opportunity,  once 
make  him  a  free  citizen  of  the  great  world  of 
thought,  introduce  him  to  affairs,  to  art  and 
literature,  and  you  give  the  indifferentism  latent 
in  him  a  chance  to  develop  itself.  Is  there  an 
educated  person  who  has  not  noticed  among  his 
friends —  and,  if  he  be  gifted  with  any  power  of 
self -analysis,  in  himself  —  this  tendency  to  regard 
with  dissatisfaction,  with  finical  criticism,  with 
satiety,  objects  which  are  not  only  worthy  but 
which  once  filled  him  with  admiring  joy  ? 

Salient  examples  of  this  familiar  phenomenon 
are  always  to  be  found  in  communities  where  the 
academic  type  of  character  is  strongly  marked. 
In  every  university  town  you  will  hear  much 
talk  of  the  local  Signor  Pococurante,  some 
scholar  of  fastidious  temper,  of  taste  scrupulously 
refined,  against  whose  severe  standards  of  criti 
cism,  whether  in  architecture,  poetry,  or  politics, 
the  heathen  rage.  How  useful  such  personages 
often  are!  Their  smiling  indifference  to  the 
popular  verdict  strengthens  the  wavering  inde 
pendence  of  weaker  men.  The  very  irritation  pro- 


44  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

duced  by  their  criticism  is  often  proof  that  the 
faults  they  perceive  are  real  faults,  and  should  be 
remedied.  How  characteristic  of  such  men  is  the 
following  passage  from  the  Memoirs  of  Mark 
Pattison :  — 

"  It  is  impossible  for  me  to  see  anything  done 
without  an  immediate  suggestion  of  how  it  might 
be  better  done.  I  cannot  travel  by  railway  with 
out  working  out  in  my  mind  a  better  time-table 
than  that  in  use.  On  the  other  hand,  this  rest 
lessness  of  the  critical  faculty  has  done  me  good 
service  when  turned  upon  myself.  I  have  never 
enjoyed  any  self-satisfaction  in  anything  I  have 
ever  done,  for  I  have  inevitably  made  a  mental 
comparison  with  how  it  might  have  been  better 
done.  The  motto  of  one  of  my  diaries,  4  Quic- 
quid  hie  operis  fiat  pcenitet,'  may  be  said  to  be 
the  motto  of  my  life." 

Undoubtedly,  this  restlessness  of  the  critical 
faculty  contributes  to  human  progress.  And  how 
upright  may  be  the  character  of  the  super-subtle 
critic,  how  singularly  attractive  his  personal 
charm ! 

Yet  after  all,  in  spite  of  Candide's  ingenuous 
opinion,  the  fact  that  "  nothing  pleases  "  a  man 


INDIFFERENTISM  45 

does  not  prove  him  a  "  prodigious  genius."  That 
he  is  "  above  everything  he  possesses  "  does  not 
demonstrate  any  native  power,  any  insight  of 
imaginative  sympathy.  Nor  do  academic  commu 
nities  present  more  pathetic  figures  than  the 
pococurantists  who  are  without  fame,  influence, 
or  many  friends ;  whose  refinement  of  feeling 
has  degenerated  into  querulousness,  and  whose 
exalted  standards  of  action  are  chiefly  displayed 
in  their  ability  to  cooperate,  to  any  useful  pur 
pose,  with  our  American  world  as  it  actually  is. 

No  one  has  yet  written,  I  believe,  the  His 
tory  of  Academic  Sterility.  Whoever  may  do  so 
will  consult  Gray  and  Gibbon  as  to  the  moral 
stagnation  of  the  English  universities  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  and  Mark  Pattison  as  to 
their  intellectual  apathy  in  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth.  "  The  men  of  middle  age,"  says  Pat 
tison  in  speaking  of  Oxford,  "  seem,  after  they 
reach  thirty-five  or  forty,  to  be  struck  with  an 
intellectual  palsy,  and  betake  themselves,  no 
longer  to  port,  but  to  the  frippery  work  of  at 
tending  boards  and  negotiating  some  phantom  of 
legislation,  with  all  the  importance  of  a  cabinet 
council  —  belli  simulacra  denies.  Then  they 


46  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

give  each  other  dinners,  where  they  assemble 
again  with  the  comfortable  assurance  that  they 
have  earned  their  evening  relaxation  by  the 
fatigues  of  the  morning's  committee." 

But  we  need  not  look  abroad  for  such  exam 
ples  of  pedantry,  of  the  false  air  of  accomplish 
ment,  of  arrested  development.  Fortunate  is  the 
American  institution  that  has  none  of  this  sterile 
stock,  these  men  who  have  been  surrounded  by 
books,  museums,  galleries,  only  to  discover  at 
last  that  they  have  no  pleasure  in  them.  To  de 
scribe  adequately  such  types  of  barrenness  one 
must  employ  those  terrible  metaphors  used  long 
ago  to  portray  secret  causes  of  spiritual  failure. 
A  wins  at  last  his  professorship ;  his  desire  has 
been  granted,  but  leanness  has  been  sent  into  his 
soul.  B  possesses  all  the  apparatus  of  scholarship, 
but  by  middle  life  there  is  no  more  oil  in  his  lamp. 
The  lamp  goes  out,  while  the  man  lives  on.  Yet 
in  the  same  county,  perhaps,  there  will  be  men 
of  straitened  means,  with  few  modern  facilities 
for  research,  slender  libraries,  little  converse  with 
fellow  scholars,  who  are  nevertheless  steadily, 
quietly,  building  up  a  national,  an  international 
reputation ;  while  the  pococurantist,  with  every- 


INDIFFERENTISM  47 

thing  he  needs  at  his  elbow,  fairly  choked  with 
the  riches  and  pleasures  of  the  scholarly  life,  not 
only  brings  no  fruit  to  perfection,  but  even  fails 
to  produce  any  fruit  at  all. 

One  may  be  pardoned  for  thus  alluding  to  the 
academic  type  of  indifferentism,  since  its  features 
are  so  familiar.  But  there  are  many  varieties  of 
indifferentists,  up  and  down  the  world,  and  all  of 
them  are  worth  studying.  What  sort  of  man  was 
that  Gallio  whose  unconcern  for  sectarian  con 
troversy  has  proverbialized  him  as  the  man  who 
"  cared  for  none  of  these  things  "  ?  I  imagine 
that  Gallio  was  a  companionable  soul,  full  of 
savor,  but  who  knows?  And  who  can  tell  us 
authoritatively  about  the  real  Horace,  that  ripe 
specimen  of  the  genial  pococurantist  whose  bland 
worldliness,  dislike  of  being  bored,  and  frank 
indifference  to  the  ambitions  and  passions  of  the 
hour  make  him  such  a  charming  figure?  Old 
Omar  Khayyam  is  a  more  subtle  pococurantist, 
of  the  pessimist  species  ;  and  Edward  FitzGerald, 
Omar's  sponsor,  was  on  many  sides  of  his  com 
plex  personality  as  perfect  a  Signer  Pococurante 
as  was  ever  bred  by  university  training  and  sub- 


48  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

sequent  insulation  from  the  world.  Is  there  not 
some  humanist  who  will  analyze  the  secret  springs 
of  indifferentism  in  men  like  these  ?  Is  it  a  de 
fect  of  the  will,  or  a  surplusage  of  philosophy? 
Is  it  a  strange  torpor  of  the  mind,  or  is  it  rather 
the  result  of  a  too  keen  intelligence  ?  Or  is  it 
merely  "  temperament  "  ?  Professor  Flint,  who 
has  recently  dissected  Agnosticism  with  the  prac 
ticed  skill  of  a  Scotch  logician,  might  be  asked 
to  make  a  diagnosis  of  Pococurantism  as  well. 
His  book  would  be  interesting  reading,  but  I 
fancy  that  Gallio  and  FitzGerald  would  put  it 
aside  with  a  quizzical  smile. 

It  is  not  too  fanciful  to  say  that  there  are  in- 
differentists  produced  by  ignorance,  as  well  as  by 
a  surfeit  of  knowledge.  Whole  classes  and  races 
are  apparently  doomed  to  a  happy-go-lucky,  semi- 
tropical  indolence  of  body  and  spirit,  —  amusing 
enough  to  the  traveler,  but  yet  dull  and  blind.  It 
may  stretch  our  Italian  word  too  far,  to  make  it 
cover  these  coarser  forms  of  indifference  to  ex 
cellence,  —  forms  that  spring  from  sheer  uncon 
sciousness  rather  than  from  satiety  with  the 
objects  of  intellectual  curiosity.  Likewise  it  may 
be  taking  too  much  liberty  with  the  word  to 


INDIFFERENTISM  49 

apply  it  to  that  unconcern  for  the  ordinary  tastes 
and  pleasures  of  mankind  which  results  from  ab 
sorption  in  some  supreme  issue.  How  many  a 
mediaeval  saint  demonstrated  his  sainthood  by 
caring  for  none  of  these  things  that  move  us  to 
such  transports,  such  pursuits,  such  struggles ! 
"Did  you  enjoy  the  lake?"  runs  the  famous  story 
about  St.  Bernard,  who  had  been  journeying  all 
day  beside  the  waters  of  Geneva.  "  Lake  ?  "  re 
plied  the  saint  in  mild  surprise,  "  what  lake  ? " 
There  may  be  a  strain  of  ethical  nobility,  no 
doubt,  in  this  forgetfulness  of  all  sensuous 
beauty.  But  the  type  of  soul  represented  by  the 
dreaming  saint  has  always  been  rare,  and  seems 
to  be  growing  rarer.  Few  high-minded  men  and 
women  are  now  content  to  press  into  the  solitary 
ways  of  lonely  spiritual  rapture  ;  the  path  of  pro 
gress  leads  them  no  longer  to  cells  in  the  high 
Alps.  The  men  and  women  most  keenly  alive  to 
spiritual  issues  are  insisting  upon  the  social 
duties,  the  validity  of  social  instincts,  the  claims 
of  the  innumerable  close-woven  bonds  of  human 
relationship.  The  true  saints,  whether  of  the 
mediaeval  or  modern  type,  are  never,  strictly 
speaking,  Pococurantes.  They  care  infinitely, 


50  THE  AMATEUR   SPIRIT 

whether  for  one  or  many  things,  but  it  is  true 
that  their  sense  of  values  has  been  so  reversed, 
as  compared  with  that  of  ordinary  men,  that  like 
the  risen  Lazarus  in  Browning's  poem,  the  things 
which  seem  trivial  to  us  are  all  important  to 
them,  while  their  great  concerns  are  our  trivi 
alities.  Yet  in  this  very  detachment  from  the 
average  standard  of  judgment,  in  their  sense  of 
superiority  to  their  surroundings  and  possessions, 
they  illustrate,  singularly  enough,  a  suggestive 
phase  of  indifferentism. 

It  is  evident  that  I  have  just  been  choosing 
extreme  examples.  But  somewhere  between  the 
peasant,  who  is  indifferent  to  ideas  because  his 
eyes  are  darkened,  and  the  saint,  whose  inner 
light  makes  the  world  of  ideas  a  mere  flickering 
unreality,  stand  men  like  Horace  and  Horace 
"Walpole,  Montaigne  and  Goethe,  Franklin  and 
Jefferson,  the  speculative,  amused,  undeluded 
children  of  this  world.  Such  men  do  not  lack 
interest  in  human  affairs,  but  they  weigh  all 
things  coolly,  and  register  the  gravity  or  the 
levity  of  our  mortal  predicament  with  the  same 
smile.  Even  if  no  pococurantists  themselves, 
they  are  the  begetters  of  Pococurantism  in 


INDIFFERENTISM  51 

others.  For  behind  such  representative  figures, 
sharing  their  recurrent  skepticism,  but  wanting 
their  robust  curiosity,  their  unimpaired  sanity, 
are  grouped  the  great  majority  of  privileged, 
educated  men.  Few  of  them  escape  some  touch, 
sooner  or  later,  of  the  temper  of  indifferentism. 
With  one  it  is  a  mere  sophomoric  affectation,  — 
a  pretense  of  unconcern,  —  while  with  another 
it  deepens  into  lifelong  habit.  But  to  all  of  us 
at  times  the  mood  of  "caring  little"  comes. 
Subtle  are  the  disguises,  puzzling  are  the  contra 
dictory  manifestations  of  the  loss  of  interest  in 
the  normally  interesting.  The  child  pokes  into 
the  inside  of  its  doll,  and  straightway  possesses 
one  delightful  mystery  the  less ;  the  worldling 
finds  his  game  not  worth  the  candle ;  the  states 
man  sees  his  great  plans  crumbling  like  a  house 
of  cards,  and  often  realizes  that  at  heart  he  cares 
for  them  as  little.  And  all  this  disillusionment 
may  come,  as  it  did  to  our  Venetian  senator, 
without  making  the  man  discourteous  or  unkind. 
Indeed  it  sometimes  seems  to  deepen  the  pococu- 
rantist's  humaner  qualities,  as  if  disillusionment 
were  the  sign  of  initiation  into  a  world-wide 
fraternity,  the  seal  of  our  mortal  experience. 


52  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

Here  is  a  well-known  passage  from  the  auto 
biography  of  one  of  the  most  gentle,  honest,  and 
unquestionably  great  men  of  our  own  day.  It 
is  the  passage  where  Charles  Darwin  confesses 
his  loss  of  interest  in  certain  things  which  had 
once  moved  him  deeply.  The  words  are  fre 
quently  commented  upon  as  illustrating  the  atro 
phy  of  unused  faculties.  That  is  indeed  their 
obvious  purport,  but  as  you  read  them,  note  how 
perfectly  they  echo,  more  than  a  century  after 
ward,  the  very  tones  of  Signor  Pococurante's 
confession  in  his  library :  — 

"  I  have  said  that  in  one  respect  my  mind  has 
changed  during  the  last  twenty  or  thirty  years. 
Up  to  the  age  of  thirty,  or  beyond  it,  poetry  of 
many  kinds,  such  as  the  works  of  Milton,  Gray, 
Byron,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Shelley,  gave 
me  great  pleasure,  and  even  as  a  schoolboy  I  took 
intense  delight  in  Shakespeare,  especially  in  the 
historical  plays.  I  have  also  said  that  formerly 
pictures  gave  me  considerable,  and  music  very 
great  delight.  But  now  for  many  years  I  cannot 
endure  to  read  a  line  of  poetry  :  I  have  tried  lately 
to  read  Shakespeare,  and  found  it  so  intolerably 
dull  that  it  nauseated  me.  I  have  also  almost 


INDIFFERENTISM  53 

lost  my  taste  for  pictures  or  music.  Music  gen 
erally  sets  me  thinking  too  energetically  on  what 
I  have  been  at  work  on,  instead  of  giving  me 
pleasure.  I  retain  some  taste  for  fine  scenery, 
but  it  does  not  cause  me  the  exquisite  delight 
which  it  formerly  did.  .  .  . 

"  This  curious  and  lamentable  loss  of  the 
higher  aesthetic  tastes  is  all  the  odder,  as  books 
on  history,  biographies,  and  travels  (independ 
ently  of  any  scientific  facts  which  they  may  con 
tain),  and  essays  on  all  sorts  of  subjects  interest 
me  as  much  as  ever  they  did.  My  mind  seems  to 
have  become  a  kind  of  machine  for  grinding 
general  laws  out  of  large  collections  of  facts,  but 
why  this  should  have  caused  the  atrophy  of  that 
part  of  the  brain  alone,  on  which  the  higher 
tastes  depend,  I  cannot  conceive.  A  man  with  a 
mind  more  highly  organized  or  better  constituted 
than  mine  would  not,  I  suppose,  have  thus  suf 
fered  ;  and  if  I  had  to  live  my  life  again,  I  would 
have  made  a  rule  to  read  some  poetry  and  listen 
to  some  music  at  least  once  every  week ;  for  per 
haps  the  parts  of  my  brain  now  atrophied  would 
thus  have  been  kept  active  through  use.  The  loss 
of  these  tastes  is  a  loss  of  happiness,  and  may 


54  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

possibly  be  injurious  to  the  intellect  and  more 
probably  to  the  moral  character,  by  enfeebling 
the  emotional  part  of  our  nature." 

The  famous  naturalist's  experience  has  been 
that  of  countless  men  whose  devotion  to  their 
own  chosen  field  has  left  them  more  and  more 
oblivious  of  general  human  or  aBsthetic  interests. 
There  are  plenty  of  Latinists  who  read  Virgil 
not  for  the  poetry  but  for  material  for  a  theory 
of  the  subjunctive,  and  they  gradually  forget 
that  there  is  any  poetry  there.  It  would  be  easy 
to  multiply  examples  of  this  narrowing  influence 
of  over-specialization.  And  it  is  instructive  to 
note  that  in  every  field  except  the  one  selected 
for  his  concentrated  activity,  the  specialist  often 
offers  a  curious  parallel  to  his  arch-enemy  the 
amateur.  Sooner  or  later,  both  tend  to  become 
pococurantists  as  regards  the  majority  of  sub 
jects  of  human  intercourse.  "  I  went  into  that  a 
good  deal  at  one  time,"  says  Mr.  Brooke  in  Mid- 
dlemarch.  It  is  the  typical  remark  of  the  typical 
amateur.  "Poetry  and  pictures  formerly  gave 
me  great  pleasure,"  says  Darwin.  "  I  was  once 
persuaded  that  I  enjoyed  Homer  and  Baphael," 
says  our  Venetian  senator.  The  three  confessions 


INDIFFERENTISM  55 

are  identical ;  the  amateur  and  the  specialist  have 
now  arrived  at  the  same  point  as  the  born  poco- 
curantist. 

There  are  other  examples  of  intellectual  and 
moral  indifferentism  no  less  striking,  although 
widely  different  in  their  source.  A  jaded  Amer 
ican  millionaire,  trying  to  get  pleasure  out  of  a 
too  long  deferred  holiday  in  Europe,  is  one  of 
the  most  depressing  of  pococurantist  spectacles. 
For  twenty  or  thirty  years  he  has  been  amassing 
a  fortune,  with  the  pluck  and  energy  which  we 
all  admire.  And  here  he  is  set  down  in  Paris  or 
Dresden  or  Florence,  ignorant  of  the  language, 
the  history,  the  architecture,  the  ideas  of  the 
country.  He  is  a  good  fellow,  but  he  is  home 
sick,  listless,  indifferent:  he  speeds  his  automo 
bile  along  some  famous  Roman  road  without  once 
kindling  at  the  thought  of  Caesar  or  Napoleon  ; 
the  Mediterranean  means  to  him  Monte  Carlo ; 
and  nothing  in  his  trip  gives  him  so  much  real 
satisfaction  as  to  buttonhole  a  fellow  American 
and  talk  to  him  about  the  superiority  of  New 
York  hotels.  He  is  taking  his  holiday  too  late. 
He  has  no  longer  any  oil  in  his  lamp.  Curiosity, 


56  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

imagination,  sympathy,  zest,  have  been  burned 
out  of  him  in  that  fierce  competitive  struggle 
where  his  life  forces  have  been  spent.  He  is  a 
victim  of  a  system,  —  of  the  quantitative  rather 
than  the  qualitative  test  of  excellence.  None  of 
our  contemporary  hallucinations  leads  more  cer 
tainly  to  ultimate  weariness  and  indifferentism 
than  this  too  exclusive  glorification  of  "  men  who 
do  things."  We  worship  size,  efficiency,  tangible 
results.  With  the  late  W.  E.  Henley  in  his  au 
tomobile  poem  we  cry :  — 

"Speed  — 
Speed,  and  a  world  of  new  hayings, 


Learning  and  Drink 

And  Money  and  Song, 

Ships,  Folios,  and  Horses, 

The  craft  of  the  Healer, 

The  worship  of  God 

And  things  done  to  the  instant 

Delight  of  the  Devil 

And  all,  all  that  tends 

To  his  swift-to-come,  swift-to-go 

Glory,  are  tested, 

Gutted,  exhausted, 

Chucked  down  the  draught ; 

And  the  quest,  the  pursuit, 

The  attack,  and  the  conquest 


INDIFFERENTISM  67 

Of  the  Unknown  goes  on  — 
Goes  on  in  the  Joy  of  the  Lord" 

It  is  a  fascinating,  record-breaking  schedule 
for  the  road-race  for  Success,  but  a  man  may 
without  cowardice  confess  that  he  is  afraid  of  it. 
One  sees  too  many  broken-down  machines  in  the 
roadside  ditch.  Study  the  faces  of  the  Men  Who 
Do  Things,  of  the  Men  of  To-morrow,  as  you 
find  them  presented  in  the  illustrated  periodi 
cals.  They  are  strong,  straightforward  faces,  the 
sign  of  a  powerful,  high-geared  bodily  mechan 
ism.  These  men  are  the  winners  in  the  game 
which  our  generation  has  set  itself  to  play.  But 
many  of  the  faces  are  singularly  hard,  insensi 
tive,  untouched  by  meditation.  If  we  have  pur 
chased  speed  and  power  at  the  cost  of  nobler 
qualities,  if  the  men  who  do  things  are  bred  at 
the  expense  of  the  men  who  think  and  feel, 
surely  the  present  American  model  needs  modifi 
cation. 

For  there  has  been  a  good  deal  of  human  his 
tory  made  upon  this  planet  before  the  invention 
of  the  automobile,  and  one  of  the  most  obvious 
lessons  of  that  history  is  the  moral  indifference 
which  is  apt  to  follow  upon  great  material  sue- 


58  THE   AMATEUR   SPIRIT 

cess.  We  perceive  that  something  is  wrong  even 
with  the  courteous  superiority  of  Signor  Pococu 
rante.  We  feel  that  it  is  a  flaw  in  an  otherwise 
kindly  and  attractive  character.  But  what  shall 
we  say  of  the  moral  insensibility,  the  sheer  reck 
lessness  of  human  life,  the  selfish  indifference  to 
the  welfare  of  weaker  races,  in  which  the  present 
decade  abounds  ?  It  is  a  new  form  of  Pococu- 
rantism,  and  one  far  more  dangerous  than  any 
dilettante  type,  because  it  attacks  stronger  men. 

"  Speed,  and  a  world  of  new  havings," 

no  matter  who  or  what  may  lie  in  the  path ! 
That  is  its  watchword.  It  has  taken  new  accents 
in  our  own  days,  but  it  is  after  all  the  old  hoarse 
shout  of  Philistinism,  trusting  in  its  sword  and 
spear  and  shield. 

Nor  are  its  less  militant  aspects  any  less  fun 
damentally  barbaric.  "  How  pleasant,"  says  one 
of  the  citizens  in  the  Easter  Sunday  scene  in 
Faust,  "  to  sit  here  and  empty  your  glass  and 
think  of  the  people  fighting  far  away !  " 

"  On  Sundays,  holidays,  there  's  naught  I  take  delight  in 
Like  gossiping  of  war  and  war's  array, 
Where  down  in  Turkey,  far  away, 
The  foreign  people  are  a-fighting." 


INDIFFERENTISM  59 

But  beneath  even  this  softer  and  more  smug 
Philistinism,  —  wrapped  comfortably  in  material 
progress,  full  of  good  nature,  of  benevolent  sen 
timent,  of  jocosity,  —  what  indifference  there  may 
be  toward  the  good  old  cause  of  world-wide  liberty 
and  fraternity,  what  essential  hardness  of  heart  I 

It  is  a  long  journey  from  Venice  in  the  eigh 
teenth  century  to  America  in  the  twentieth.  Yet 
the  decaying  commercial  republic  of  Italy,  draw 
ing  to  itself  even  in  its  decline  the  treasures  of 
the  East  and  West,  offering  to  the  stranger,  with 
a  sort  of  splendid  affluence,  both  its  best  and  its 
worst,  presents  more  than  one  likeness  to  the  vast, 
prosperous  America  of  to-day.  Among  our  coun 
trymen  who  have  enjoyed  full  opportunities  for 
culture,  there  are  few  who  have  not  at  times 
shared  the  listlessness,  the  apathy  of  that  Vene 
tian  nobleman  who  was  cloyed  with  his  own  trea 
sures.  How  can  it  be  otherwise  ?  How  can  the 
man  or  woman  of  normal  power  constantly  re 
spond  to  the  multiform  stimulus  of  these  swift 
days  of  ours  ?  Who  can  adequately  react  even  to 
the  news  contained  in  the  morning  paper  ?  Here 
is  the  life  of  the  whole  world  brought  daily  to  the 


60  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

door.  But  who  is  ready  to  weigh  it,  sift  it,  assimi 
late  it  ?  No  wonder  that  men  and  women  of  fine 
fibre  are  conscious  too  often  of  that  lassitude 
which  comes  from  wandering  through  the  rooms 
of  a  great  museum,  a  weariness  like  that  which 
oppresses  the  conscientious  sight-seer  at  a  World's 
Fair. 

We  cannot  rest,  meditate,  dream,  without  miss 
ing  our  train,  breaking  our  engagement.  We 
hurry  on,  through  this  crowded,  absorbing,  splen 
didly  rich  and  varied  life  of  contemporary 
America,  a  race  of  a  few  athletes  and  millions  of 
nervous  dyspeptics.  We  are  a  restless  people, 
hypnotized  with  transient  enthusiasms.  To-day  we 
plan  a  marble  archway  for  a  naval  hero,  build 
it  to-morrow  in  plaster,  and  the  day  after  tear  it 
down.  We  idolize  the  phrases  of  the  Declaration 
of  Independence  for  two  or  three  generations, 
and  then  suddenly  make  the  discovery  that  they 
are  mere  generalities,  good  enough  for  the  library, 
but  inapplicable  to  practical  affairs.  All  the 
wealth  of  our  physical  resources,  all  the  marvels  of 
our  tangible  success,  are  not  enough,  it  appears,  to 
save  us  from  the  Old  World  vice  of  indifferent- 
ism,  from  the  swift  relapse  into  disillusionment. 


INDIFFERENTISM  61 

Let  us  come  back  to  Voltaire's  parable.  He 
was  a  master  of  dialectic  weapons,  and  in  this 
novel  about  the  quest  of  happiness  he  scores  his 
point  with  impeccable  precision.  Signer  Pococu 
rante  is  not  happy.  Candide  is  searching  for  a 
perfectly  happy  person,  and  he  does  not  find  one, 
even  in  that  admirably  furnished  palace  upon  the 
Brenta.  A  man's  life,  in  other  words,  consists  not 
in  the  abundance  of  the  things  which  he  pos 
sesses.  Yet  the  road  to  happiness  is  not  through 
caring  little,  —  as  the  Stoics  will  still  have  it,  — 
but  through  caring  much  and  continuing  to  care 
much.  It  is  the  ardent,  luminous  mind,  not  the 
smothered,  hypercritical  mind,  which  has  the 
truer  perception  of  values.  The  disillusionized 
man  is  not  necessarily  the  wise  man.  Hamlet  was 
wiser,  more  truly  philosophical  in  the  university 
at  Wittenberg,  where  he  was  doubtless  taught 
"  What  a  piece  of  work  is  a  man  !  how  noble  in 
reason !  how  infinite  in  faculty ! "  than  he  was 
later,  when,  in  the  stress  of  unequal  conflict  with 
the  world,  he  added  the  sad  personal  footnote, 
"  And  yet,  to  me,  what  is  this  quintessence  of 
dust?" 

In  actual    human    intercourse,    furthermore, 


62  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

your  disillusionized  man  or  woman  is,  to  put  it 
plainly,  apt  to  prove  himself  a  bore.  It  is  amus 
ing  enough  for  a  while  to  hear  some  melancholy 
Jaques  wittily  rail  and  sneer,  but  it  soon  grows 
tiresome.  The  most  agreeable  companion  in  the 
game  of  life  is  what  golfers  call  the  "cheerful 
duffer,"  who  plays  shockingly,  it  is  true,  but  who 
is  always  hoping  and  struggling  to  beat  bogey  on 
the  next  hole.  It  is  in  the  mood  of  the  awkward 
idealist,  and  not  of  the  graceful  pococurantist, 
that  most  of  the  good  work  of  the  world  is  done. 
There  is  plentiful  absurdity,  no  doubt,  in  the 
popular  interpretation  of  what  has  been  so  widely 
heralded  as  the  doctrine  of  "  strenuousness."  As 
a  counter-gospel  to  that  of  mere  fault-finding 
inertia  or  obstructionism,  strenuousness  is  well 
enough.  But  superficially  understood,  it  may 
mean  nothing  more  than  the  cult  of  activity  for 
its  own  sake ;  "  hustling,"  as  we  love  to  say, 
for  the  mere  end  of  being  a  "  hustler."  No  na 
tion  ever  needed  such  a  doctrine  less  than  we. 
We  have  already  too  much  headlong  hurry  that 
does  not  count :  like  the  nervous  pulling  on  and 
off  of  sweaters  by  the  substitutes  on  the  side 
lines  of  a  football-field,  it  shows  feverish  activity 


INDIFFERENTISM  63 

and  energy,  but  it  does  not  advance  the  ball. 
The  real  purport  of  the  strenuous  doctrine  is 
rather  this :  that  life  is  infinitely  significant ; 
that  it  should  not  be  frittered  away,  either  in 
finical  criticism  or  in  foolish,  irrelevant  activities. 
It  is  meant  to  be  used,  —  intelligently,  fully,  gen 
erously.  Those  are  fine  lines  of  Henry  van 
Dyke:  — 

"  Life  is  an  arrow  —  therefore  you  must  know 
What  mark  to  aim  at,  how  to  use  the  bow  — 
Then  draw  it  to  the  head,  and  let  it  go !  " 

It  is  the  good  fortune  of  some  men  and  women 
to  feel  instinctively  this  potential  value  of  hu 
man  life.  Others  learn  it  tardily,  after  the  oil 
in  the  lamp  is  low.  But  nothing  is  more  inspir 
iting  than  to  see  human  beings  make  the  great 
acceptance,  and  devote  themselves  to  some  gen 
erous  service.  The  bow  is  meant  to  shoot  with, 
and  not  to  hang  on  the  wall.  It  improves  with 
age,  and  so  should  men  and  women.  "  We  grow 
simpler,"  wrote  Thackeray,  "  as  we  grow  older." 

For,  after  all,  these  contemporary  forms  of 
indifferentism  are  not  final.  We  shall  doubtless 
specialize  more,  rather  than  less,  and  yet  the 
narrowing  tendencies  of  absorption  in  one's  own 


64  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

specialty  may  be  resisted.  The  lassitude  that 
marks  the  reaction  from  great  and  long-con 
tinued  effort  is  perhaps  inevitable ;  but  in  those 
hours  one  may  refresh  himself  from  the  deep 
fountains  that  spring  up  within  the  soul.  One's 
individual  success  or  happiness  may  tempt  him 
to  regard  the  less  fortunate  with  an  indifferent 
eye,  but  in  a  democracy  like  ours  Dives  and 
Lazarus  may  always  be  trusted  to  shift  places, 
if  you  will  but  give  them  time. 

To  avoid  that  cold,  paralyzing  touch  of  indif- 
ferentism,  one  can  at  least  endeavor  to  live  sim 
ply.  There  is  even  now  apparent,  in  the  press, 
in  many  strange  pulpits,  and  in  the  private  talk 
of  men  in  every  section  of  the  country,  a  whole 
some  tendency  to  praise  this  "  simple  life."  It  is 
perhaps  a  by-product  of  prosperity,  for  the  doc 
trine  it  praises  is  more  easily  followed  by  the 
rich  than  by  the  poor.  A  fine  simplicity  of  mind 
often  accompanies  great  wealth,  while  poverty  is 
as  often  the  cause  of  perpetual  duplicity  and 
fear.  But  fortunately  for  our  generation,  both 
rich  and  poor  have  been  rediscovering  Nature. 
We  have  found  sources  of  joy  in  familiar  sur 
roundings  and  in  common  things.  It  is  one  step 


INDIFFERENTISM  65 

toward  rediscovering  ourselves.  <f  Simplifica 
tion,"  as  Mr.  John  Morley  has  so  often  pointed 
out,  was  the  motto  of  that  Eevolution  which  fol 
lowed  so  swiftly  upon  the  mood  of  Voltairean 
doubt ;  and  now  that  a  whole  cycle  of  experi 
ence  has  been  accomplished,  simplification  should 
be  the  watchword  once  more.  "Plain  living 
and  high  thinking  "  is  a  hackneyed  phrase,  and 
represents  for  many  of  us  but  a  forced  virtue ; 
yet  plain  living  and  high  thinking  are  at  least 
not  the  soil  in  which  Pococurantism  flourishes. 
A  quiet  mind  that  recalls  the  enduring  lessons 
of  history,  a  meditative  mind  that  perceives  the 
secret  of  vitality  in  true  books  and  true  men,  a 
sane  mind  that  sees  life  wholesomely  and  hu 
manly,  —  this  is  what  one  must  cultivate  if  he 
would  share  the  inexhaustible  freshness,  the  un 
ceasing  energy,  which  make  the  daily  gladness 
of  the  world. 

And  the  last  words  of  Signor  Pococurante 
himself  are  not  to  be  forgotten.  They  relate,  it 
may  be  remembered,  to  his  garden.  He  is  in 
deed  dissatisfied  with  it,  as  with  everything  else, 
and  yet  he  adds,  in  words  that  almost  redeem  his 
character  and  testify  to  his  essentially  human 


66  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

quality :  "  I  shall  have  another  laid  out  to-mor 
row  upon  a  nobler  plan."  How  persistent,  how 
indestructible  is  idealism,  even  in  the  breast  of 
a  professed  indifferentist !  This  idealism  is  an 
integral  part  of  our  inheritance.  Though  baffled 
at  every  point,  it  underlies  and  corrects  our  tran 
sient  fits  of  despondent  criticism.  Indifferentism 
should  be  studied,  controlled,  counteracted;  but 
in  most  of  us,  after  all,  it  is  a  mood  only.  It  is 
a  shadow  on  the  landscape.  Yet  far  below  it  in 
our  nature  there  is  the  undefeated  desire,  the 
imperishable  aspiration,  that  to-morrow  may  find 
us  dwelling  in  another  garden,  built  upon  a 
nobler  plan.  That  is  our  human  heritage  of  toil 
and  hope,  and  it  is  a  man's  part  to  reenter  it 
daily  with  courage  and  good  cheer. 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE 
PKOFESSOR 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR 

IT  is  an  impertinence  to  ask  a  man  still  in  the 
game  whether  the  game  be  worth  the  candle.  He 
thought  so  once,  no  doubt,  or  he  would  not  have 
begun  playing ;  and  the  courteous  presumption 
is  that  he  persists  in  his  opinion.  Whatever  may 
be  his  secret  guesses  as  to  the  value  of  the  stake, 
your  true  sportsman  will  play  the  game  out,  and 
as  long  as  he  is  playing  his  best,  he  makes  but  an 
indifferent  philosopher.  No  man  absorbed  in  a 
profession  can  assess  critically  that  profession's 
claims  and  its  rewards,  but  he  can  at  least  recall 
some  of  his  anticipations  upon  entering  it,  and 
compare  them  with  the  realities  of  his  actual  ex 
perience. 

To  a  young  man  with  some  taste  for  the  things 
of  the  mind,  the  life  of  a  college  professor  offers 
manifold  points  of  attraction.  The  candidates  for 
the  profession  have  usually  won  some  distinction 
as  undergraduates,  so  that  from  the  first  moment 
of  post-graduate  study  one  has  the  feeling  of  asso- 


70  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

elation  and  rivalry  with  picked  men.  I The  days 
when  the  valedictorian  was  invariably  called  back 
to  his  Alma  Mater  as  a  tutor,  to  be  used  in  any 
department  happening  to  be  short  of  tutors  that 
year,  or  when  the  Kev.  Mr.  Blinker  of  Mudville, 
famous  in  college  as  a  mighty  handler  of  the  lexi 
con,  but  quite  unappreciated  in  Mudville,  was  on 
that  account  tolerably  sure  of  getting  a  professor 
ship,  are  indeed  rapidly  receding.  Sometimes 
men  drift  into  college  work  from  other  callings, 
or  are  drafted  from  among  the  teachers  in  pre 
paratory  schools,  but  the  conventional  road  to 
promotion  is  some  form  of  specialized  graduate 
study.  The  experience  of  foreign  life  thus  comes 
to  many  an  American  in  the  years  when  he  is 
most  impressionable  to  its  stimulus  and  charm. 
Berlin  and  Leipsic,  it  is  true,  send  back  young 
doctors  who  are  delightfully  unconscious  how 
much  they  must  unlearn,  but  most  of  them  get 
their  bearings  again  long  before  they  secure  their 
coveted  chairs.  yThe  years  of  preliminary  training 
as  tutor  or  assistant  are  likely  to  be  happy  years, 
too,  in  spite  of  drudgery  and  jealousies  and  hope 
deferred.  There  is  the  excitement  of  meeting 
one's  first  classes;  the  first  curious  glimpse,  it 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     71 

may  be,  into  faculty  meetings ;  the  first  letter 
addressed  to  you  as  "  Professor  "  —  you  bless  the 
kindly  error ;  the  notice  of  your  first  paper  ;  the 
companionship  of  other  young  fellows  like  your 
self,  already  infinitely  removed  from  undergradu 
ate  sympathies,  and  not  yet  admitted  to  the  inner 
circle  of  professorial  intimacies.  Lucky  years, 
when  spurs  are  to  be  had  for  the  winning,  and 
when  many  a  teacher,  without  ever  suspecting  it, 
does  the  best  work  of  his  life  ! 

At  last,  on  the  red-lettered  day  of  all,  comes 
the  professorship,  the  solid-built  chair  that  is 
warranted  to  last,  instead  of  the  temporary  affair 
which  you  now  turn  over  to  the  next  man  behind 
you.  You  are  secure.  Barring  incapacitating  ill 
ness,  and  flagrant  violation  of  the  Decalogue,  it 
is  a  life-appointment.  The  salary  is  small,  but 
what  there  is  of  it  is  tolerably  certain  to  be  paid ; 
one  can  marry  on  it  if  he  has  the  courage  to  live 
plainly.  Your  lifelong  associates  will  be  gentle 
men.  Your  chosen  field  of  work,  in  science  or 
philosophy  or  literature,  stretches  before  you  in 
tempting  vistas.  One-third  of  the  year  will  be 
vacation  time  and  hence  all  your  own,  —  for  la 
bor,  if  your  ambition  holds,  for  rest,  if  you  find 


72  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

it  flagging.  You  have  the  opportunity  to  impress 
the  best  there  is  in  yourself  upon  a  perpetually 
renewed  stream  of  youthful  and  more  or  less  ar 
dent  minds,  and  in  this  thought  what  satisfaction 
for  the  didactic  instinct,  for  the  ineradicable 
schoolmaster  that  is  lurking  in  us  all !  Can  any 
profession  offer  a  program  half  so  certain,  under 
normal  conditions,  of  a  fair  fulfillment  ?  Surely 
the  candle  burns  brightly  at  the  beginning  of  the 
game. 

As  the  years  go  by,  does  the  college  professor 
regret  his  choice?  I  know  a  few  who  would 
gladly  change  their  calling,  but  only  a  few,  and 
these  are  mainly  men  of  energetic,  practical  cast, 
who  now  recognize  that  by  entering  another  pro 
fession  they  might  have  quadrupled  their  in 
come.  Men  of  strong  literary  and  scholarly  bent 
are  less  likely  to  question  the  wisdom  of  their 
choice,  and  indeed,  of  those  outside  the  college 
circle,  it  seems  to  be  the  "  literary  fellows  "  who 
speak  with  most  envy  of  the  professor's  lot. 
Aside  from  lazy  midsummer  guesses  at  what  one 
might  have  been  —  and  who  does  not  hazard 
these  at  times?  —  I  find  college  teachers  pecu 
liarly  contented. 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     73 

To  turn  to  the  material  side  of  things,  the 
assurance  of  a  fixed  income  is  a  source  of  per 
manent  satisfaction,  however  disproportionate  the 
income  to  the  service  that  is  rendered.  To  be 
sure,  the  salary  of  a  full  professor,  the  country 
over,  is  little  if  at  all  in  excess  of  $2000.  In 
the  larger  universities  it  may  rise  to  $3000  or 
something  more,  but  the  men  who  receive  above 
$4000  are  so  few  as  to  scarcely  affect  the  gen 
eral  average.  Aside  from  the  bare  possibility  of 
a  call  to  a  richer  institution,  the  college  profes 
sor  is  not  likely  to  be  earning  more  at  fifty  than 
at  thirty.  Unlike  most  other  professions,  there 
is  here  no  gradual  increase  of  income  to  give 
tangible  evidence  of  a  man's  growth  in  power. 
Unless  one  has  taken  the  Northern  Farmer's 
thrifty  advice  and  "  gone  where  money  is  "  when 
he  married,  his  outlook  as  he  faces  old  age  is 
not  reassuring.  Pensions  are  extremely  rare ; 
college  trustees  are  forced  in  most  cases  to  be  as 
ungrateful  as  republics.  The  cost  of  living  has 
steadily  risen  in  college  towns,  keeping  pace 
with  the  general  increase  of  luxury  throughout 
the  older  communities.  Here  and  there,  particu 
larly  in  the  West,  there  are  exceptions,  but  upon 


74  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

the  whole  the  scale  of  necessary  expenditure,  for 
a  man  fulfilling  the  various  social  duties  re 
quired  by  his  position,  is  constantly  growing 
greater.  The  professor's  incidental  income  from 
books  and  lectures  is  ordinarily  insignificant. 
When  he  has  paid  his  bills  he  finds  no  margin 
left  for  champagne  and  terrapin.  If  he  smokes 
at  all,  he  invents  ingenious  reasons  for  prefer 
ring  a  pipe.  He  sees  the  light-hearted  tutors  sail 
for  Europe  every  summer,  but  as  for  himself,  he 
decides  annually  that  it  will  be  wiser  to  wait 
just  one  year  more.  Once  in  a  while  he  will 
yield  to  the  temptation  to  pick  up  a  first  edition 
or  a  good  print,  but  Aldines  and  Kembrandt 
proofs  are  toys  he  may  not  dally  with.  In  short, 
his  tastes  are  cultivated  beyond  his  income,  and 
his  sole  comfort  is  in  the  Pharisaical  reflection 
that  this  is  better,  after  all,  than  to  have  more 
income  than  taste.  If  his  meditations  upon  qua 
ternions  or  Descartes  or  the  lyric  cry  are  liable 
to  be  interrupted  by  an  insulting  cook,  striking 
for  another  dollar  that  he  can  ill  spare,  it  is 
doubtless  a  device  of  Providence  to  keep  him 
in  healthy  touch  with  actualities.  It  were  a  pity 
that  in  the  colleges,  of  all  places,  high  thinking 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     75 

and  plain  living  should  be  quite  divorced,  and 
that  the  men  whose  duty  it  is  to  train  American 
boys  in  citizenship  as  well  as  in  letters  should 
themselves  have  no  need  to  practice  the  stern 
virtues  of  industry  and  thrift. 

No  man's  satisfaction  or  dissatisfaction  with 
his  salary,  however,  affords  a  complete  indica 
tion  of  his  attitude  toward  his  work.  A  more 
subtle  arithmetic  makes  up  the  sum  of  failure  or 
success.  After  ten,  twenty,  or  thirty  years  of 
experience,  the  college  professor  may  be  analyst 
enough  to  pass  verdict  upon  the  result  of  his 
own  efforts,  but  an  outsider's  estimate  may  even 
then  be  more  accurate  than  his  own.  Besides, 
many  a  man's  point  of  view  becomes  insensibly 
but  increasingly  modified  after  he  has  entered 
upon  his  vocation,  so  that  it  is  difficult  for  him 
to  decide  whether  his  early  ambitions  have  been 
realized. 

There  are  two  professional  types,  assuredly, 
that  are  admirably  adjusted  to  their  environment; 
the  born  investigator,  and  the  born  teacher.  Men 
belonging  to  the  first  of  these  classes  find  in  re 
search  itself  a  sufficient  recompense  ;  their  happi 
ness  is  in  widening  the  bounds  of  knowledge,  and 


76  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

undermining  stoutly  intrenched  stupidities,  and 
adding  to  the  effectiveness  of  human  energy.  Al 
most  every  college  has  one  or  more  of  these  men. 
The  larger  institutions  have  many  of  them,  and 
the  college  community  is  their  rightful  place. 
They  deserve  their  bed  and  board,  —  and  their 
cakes  and  ale  besides  —  even  if  they  are  too  ab 
sent-minded  to  remember  their  lecture  hours,  or 
too  .feebly  magnetic  to  hold  the  attention  of  un 
dergraduates.  An  unerring  process  of  differenti 
ation  is  constantly  at  work,  marking  out  these 
born  scholars  and  scientists  from  those  of  their 
colleagues  who  possess  scholarly  and  scientific 
tastes,  but  who  learn  by  the  time  they  are  forty 
that  they  are  never  likely  to  produce  anything. 
These  latter  men  often  make  noteworthy  drill- 
masters.  Their  respect  for  original  scholarship 
grows  as  they  come  to  recognize  that  it  is  beyond 
their  own  reach.  Though  they  discover  the  fu 
tility  of  "  doing  something  for  "  science  or  litera 
ture  themselves,  they  touch  elbows  daily  with 
men  who  can,  and  they  reflect  something  of  the 
glory  of  it,  and  impart  to  their  pupils  a  regard 
for  sound  learning. 
;  Not  every  teacher,  of  course,  is  an  investigator 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     77 

manque.  Your  born  teacher  is  as  rare  as  a  poet, 
and  as  likely  to  die  young.  Once  in  a  while  a 
college  gets  hold  of  one.  It  does  not  always 
know  that  it  has  him,  and  proceeds  to  ruin  him 
by  over-driving,  the  moment  he  shows  power  ;  or 
to  let  another  college  lure  him  away  for  a  few 
hundred  dollars  more  a  year.  But  while  he  lasts 
—  and  sometimes,  fortunately,  he  lasts  till  the  end 
of  a  long  life  —  he  transforms  the  lecture-hall  as 
by  enchantment.  Lucky  is  the  alumnus  who  can 
call  the  roll  of  his  old  instructors,  and  among  the 
martinets  and  the  pedants  and  the  piously  inane 
can  here  and  there  come  suddenly  upon  a  man ; 
a  man  who  taught  him  to  think  or  helped  him  to 
feel,  and  thrilled  him  with  a  new  horizon.  J 

Sometimes  it  happens  that  the  great  teacher  is 
also  a  great  investigator,  but  that  is  a  miracle. 
For  a  man  to  be  either  one  or  the  other  — not  to 
speak  of  being  both  —  requires  singular  vitality. 
Outsiders  usually  underestimate  the  obstacles  to 
successful  professorial  work.  With  regard  to 
one's  own  scholarly  ambitions,  particularly,  the 
steady  term-time  strain,  the  thankless  and  idle 
sessions  of  committees,  the  variety  of  demands 
upon  one's  time  and  energy,  combine  to  make 


78  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

one  pay  a  heavy  price  for  winning  distinction. 
You  must  do,  upon  the  average,  as  much  teach 
ing  as  your  colleagues,  and  the  time  for  your 
magnum  opus  must  either  be  stolen  from  that 
due  your  classes,  or  you  must  accomplish  two 
days'  work  in  one.  It  is  true  that  the  number  of 
hours  of  classroom  instruction  required  of  the 
professor  varies  greatly  in  different  institutions. 
Sometimes  a  schedule  of  four  hours  per  week  is 
considered  sufficient,  in  the  case  of  men  who 
have  won  the  right  to  devote  themselves  to  ad 
vanced  research.  In  the  smaller  colleges,  and  for 
the  younger  men  in  the  larger  ones,  the  schedule 
is  often  sixteen  or  twenty  hours.  Perhaps  twelve 
would  be  a  fair  average  for  colleges  and  univer 
sities  the  country  over.  To  teach  college  boys  for 
two  hours  a  day  does  not  seem  like  a  very  severe 
task  to  one  who  has  never  tried  it,  but  I  have 
observed  that  most  professors  who  have  taught 
or  lectured  for  two  hours  thoroughly  well,  putting 
their  best  powers  into  the  task,  are  ready  to  quit. 
Few  men  can  rivet  the  attention  of  fifty  or  a  hun 
dred  students  for  one  hour  without  feeling,  five 
minutes  after  the  end  of  it,  that  vitality  has  gone 
out  of  them.  The  emery  wheel  that  wears  out 


THE  LIFE   OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     79 

fastest  cuts  the  diamond  best ;  and  when  a  man 
boasts  that  he  teaches  without  effort  and  weari 
ness,  he  has  sufficiently  described  his  teaching. 
Every  college  town  has  its  own  pitiful  or  tragic 
stories  of  professors  who  have  broken  down  ;  they 
are  usually  the  men  whom  the  college  could  least 
afford  to  lose.  It  is  no  wonder  that  in  the  face 
of  all  this  many  professors  cease  trying  to  ride 
two  horses  at  once  ;  they  either  do  their  duty  by 
their  classes  and  let  the  dust  gather  on  the  leaves 
of  the  magnum  opus,  or  else  they  get  over  their 
class  work  with  as  little  expenditure  of  energy  as 
possible,  and  give  to  the  magnum  opus  their  real 
strength.  And  the  college  would  not  be  the  mi 
crocosm  it  is  if  there  were  not  some  professors 
who  abandon  both  ambitions  after  a  little,  be 
coming  quite  incurable  though  often  very  charm 
ing  dead-beats ;  and  this,  I  confess,  is  the  most 
interesting  type  of  all. 

It  is  a  pity  that  Mark  Pattison,  whose  Memoirs 
throw  so  terribly  frank  a  light  upon  the  intel 
lectual  side  of  university  life,  did  not  leave  be 
hind  him  that  essay  upon  Academic  Sterility 
which  I  have  already  suggested  that  someone 
ought  to  write.  He  may  have  thought  that 


80  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

AmleVs  Journal  pictured  the  malady,  for  once 
and  all;  and  certainly  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward, 
whose  Langham  is  an  attempted  personification 
of  the  class,  has  succeeded  only  in  clothing  with 
an  English  garb  the  self -distrust  and  impotence 
of  will  of  the  lonely  Genevese  professor.  There 
can  be  no  reasonable  doubt  that  the  academic 
atmosphere  is  unfavorable  to  creative  vigor.  Few 
vital  books  come  out  of  the  universities.  One 
cause,  beyond  question,  is  the  prevalence  of  the 
critical  spirit. 

"  Our  knowledge  petrifies  our  rhymes." 

A  sophisticated  sense  that  everything  has  been 
written,  and  better  than  it  is  likely  to  be  written 
again,  is  not  the  stuff  from  which  literature  is 
bred.  It  may  be  that  a  mere  over-accumulation 
of  material  prevents  the  scholar  from  ever  turn 
ing  his  treasures  to  account;  the  monumental 
treatise  becomes  arrested,  like  Mr.  Casaubon's, 
in  the  pigeon-hole  stage.  Often,  too,  he  outlives 
his  former  intellectual  interests,  and  his  drawers 
are  crammed  with  various  half -completed  pieces 
of  work,  melancholy  reminders  of  enthusiasms 
that  have  now  grown  cold  and  long  years  that 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     81 

have  been  wasted.  In  morbid  self -depreciation  or 
well-grounded  despair  of  making  any  contribu 
tion  to  the  world's  thought,  and  disgusted  with 
class-room  routine,  many  a  gifted  man,  unwilling 
or  unable  to  resign  his  chair,  turns  tramp.  Care 
less  of  public  opinion,  he  adopts  some  pet  avoca 
tion  for  his  vocation  henceforth,  makes  an  opiate 
out  of  a  hobby,  and  settles  down  for  the  rest  of 
his  days  into  a  fly-fisherman,  or  amateur  photo 
grapher,  or  cross-country  saunterer,  or  novel 
reader.  But  it  is  then  that  he  is  worth  knowing  ! 
"  May  God  forgive  me,"  cried  Sir  Walter  Scott 
to  his  Diary,  "  for  thinking  that  anything  can  be 
made  out  of  a  schoolmaster !  "  Ah,  shade  of  Sir 
Walter,  out  of  a  schoolmaster  who  has  survived 
his  illusions  and  is  cheerfully  planting  his  cab 
bages,  there  may  be  made  the  most  delightful 
companion  in  the  world ! 

It  is  because  a  college  faculty  exhibits  this  sur 
prising  range  of  types,  illustrative,  in  little,  of 
almost  every  variety  of  success  and  failure  known 
to  the  greater  world,  that  it  furnishes  so  per 
petually  interesting  a  spectacle.  No  man  who  has 
returned  to  his  own  Alma  Mater  to  teach  is  likely 
to  forget  the  impressions  received  at  those  first 


82  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

faculty  meetings,  where  he  has  met  on  terms  of 
absolute  equality  the  gentlemen  whose  corporate 
action  decided  so  many  vital  issues  —  as  it  then 
seemed  —  in  his  own  undergraduate  life.  What 
a  revelation  to  find  that  "  the  faculty  "  are  very 
much  like  other  men  :  with  prejudices  and  favor 
ite  animosities ;  capable  of  being  much  confused 
by  a  motion  to  amend  an  amendment,  and  much 
relieved  by  a  proposition  to  refer  to  a  committee ; 
the  younger  ones  rigid  and  the  older  ones  lenient 
in  enforcing  the  letter  of  the  law ;  all  of  them  glad 
to  adjourn,  and  retire  to  their  own  toil  or  their 
own  decorous  beer  and  skittles  !  But  what  mas 
tery  of  parliamentary  fence,  on  the  part  of  old 
gentlemen  who  have  been  making  and  withdraw 
ing  motions  for  half  a  century ! l  What  deep 
wrath  among  the  disciplinarians  over  that  vote  to 
restore  the  erring  half-back  (needed  in  Novem 
ber)  to  full  standing  in  his  class  !  What  subtle 
argumentation,  pro  and  con,  over  Smith's  petition 
to  be  excused  from  chapel  on  the  ground  of  his 
physician's  written  statement  that  Smith's  eye- 

1  I  recall  one  such  expert,  who,  at  the  first  faculty  meeting  of 
the  college  year,  offered  a  prayer  that  he  and  his  colleagues 
might  he  endowed  with  "  holy  skill." 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFIiSSOR     83 

lids  are  liable  to  inflammation  upon  sudden  ex 
posure  to  the  morning  air !  What  passionate 
denunciation  of  the  faculty's  past  injustice  in 
the  famous  Kobinson  case,  pronounced  by  some 
sunny-tempered  philosopher  who  has  just  per 
suaded  himself  that  whenever  the  student  body 
differs  with  the  faculty  on  a  moral  question  the 
students  are  surely  in  the  right!  And  is  it  not 
singular  that  over  that  question  of  Jones's  rank, 
which  any  man  in  the  room  could  settle  satis 
factorily  enough  in  two  minutes  if  left  to  him 
self,  two  or  three  dozen  educated  and  experi 
enced  gentlemen  should  sit  in  futile  misery  for 
half  an  hour,  only,  at  the  end  of  it,  to  follow 
sheeplike  some  obstinate  motion  that  takes  them 
through  precisely  the  wrong  hole  in  the  wall? 
Until  the  psychology  of  mobs  is  better  compre 
hended,  there  will  be  no  understanding  the  ways 
of  "  faculty  action."  Even  when  we  shall  have 
learned  that  the  normal  powers  of  the  two  or 
three  dozen  men  are  under  some  strange  para 
lyzing  inhibition,  shall  we  be  able  to  explain 
why  the  inhibition  should  proceed  from  the  most 
thick-headed  man  in  the  room  ? 

To  these  gentlemen  who  grow  old  in  the  shel- 


84  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

tered  academic  life,  a  thousand  whimsicalities 
and  petty  formalities  attach  themselves,  like  bar 
nacles  to  the  bottom  of  a  ship  long  at  anchor. 
No  man  can  teach  ten  years  and  escape  them. 
Unbeknown  to  himself  he  is  already  on  the 
way  to  becoming  a  "  character,"  and  people  are 
smiling  at  him  in  their  sleeves.  If  he  finds  him 
self  at  a  reception,  he  buttonholes  a  colleague 
and  talks  shop.  The  habit  of  addressing  boys, 
without  contradiction,  leaves  him  often  impotent 
in  the  sharp  give-and-take  of  talk  with  men,  and 
many  a  professor  who  is  eloquent  in  his  class 
room  is  helpless  on  the  street,  or  in  the  club,  or 
across  the  dinner-table.  Sometimes  he  perceives 
thist  and  makes  pathetic  efforts  to  grow  worldly. 
Faculty  circles  have  been  known  to  experience 
strange  obsessions  of  frivolity,  and  to  plunge 
desperately  into  dancing  lessons  or  duplicate 
whist.  Both  the  remedy  and  the  disease  have 
their  comic  aspects,  and  yet  I  know  of  no  circles 
where  the  twilight  hour  of  familiar  talk  is  more 
delightful,  where  common  instincts  and  training 
and  old  associations  touch  the  ordinary  court 
esies  of  life  with  a  more  peculiar  charm,  where 
mutual  pride  is  so  little  spoiled  by  familiarity, 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     85 

and  where  lifelong  friendships,  undisturbed  by  the 
accidents  frequent  in  the  greater  world,  grow  so 
intimate  and  touching  as  the  evil  days  draw  nigh. 
•*•  A  professor's  attitude  toward  the  undergrad 
uates  is  a  good  test  of  his  personality,  but  a  still 
better  one  may  be  found  in  their  attitude  toward 
him.  They  are  shrewd  judges  of  character,  intol 
erant  of  shams,  and  demoniacally  ingenious  in 
finding  the  weak  places  in  a  man's  armor.  If  he 
is  a  shirk  or  an  ignoramus,  they  know  it  as  soon 
as  he  —  perhaps  sooner.  Your  college  student  is 
a  strange  compound  of  reverence  and  irrever 
ence,  conservative  and  anarchist,  man  and  boy. 
If  you  decide  to  treat  him  as  a  youngster  he 
straightway  astonishes  you  by  his  maturity;  if 
you  thereupon  make  up  your  mind  to  consider 
him  henceforth  as  a  man,  he  will  be  guilty  of 
prompt  and  enthusiastic  lapses  into  juvenility. 
An  American  college  is  half  public  school,  half 
university.  Toward  professors  whom  they  like, 
students  are  finely  loyal,  though  the  curious 
alternations  of  popularity  which  fall  to  some 
teachers  at  the  hands  of  successive  classes  are 
quite  beyond  the  reach  of  analysis.  If  they  do 
not  like  a  professor,  and  can  get  the  whip  hand 


86  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

over  him,  undergraduates  know  how  to  demon- 

£rate  that  twenty  is  the  age  of  perfect  cruelty. 

In  few  college   recitation   rooms,  nowadays,  is 

I 

there  anything  said  about  the  whip  hand,  but  it 
is  always  there,  on  one  side  or  the  other.  Every 
lecture  hall  witnesses  a  daily  though  possibly  un 
conscious  struggle  of  talent,  training,  and  char 
acter  against  the  crowd.  The  lecturer  usually 
wins,  because  he  knows  he  must,  but  many  a 
one  who  has  never  experienced  defeat  invariably 
rises,  like  Gough,  with  knees  that  tremble.  La 
boratory  and  seminary  methods  of  instruction 
alter  these  conditions,  of  course,  and  bring  the 
professor  at  once  into  informal  and  even  inti 
mate  relation  with  his  pupils^  Upon  the  whole, 
the  contact  with  college  classes  is  agreeable  to  a 
man  of  friendly  temperament.  He  learns  to  make 
allowance  for  undergraduate  conventionalities, 
and  does  not  expect  enthusiasm  where  enthusi 
asm  would  be  bad  form.  On  their  part,  students 
generously  overlook  the  whims  and  crotchets  of 
a  favorite  professor ;  they  even  pardon  his  amaze 
ment  at  the  ways  of  intercollegiate  diplomacy,  or 
his  radical  skepticism  as  to  the  intellectual  dis 
cipline  involved  in  football. 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     87 

In  one  sense,  indeed,  he  is  supposed  to  know 
very  little  about  the  men  whom  he  teaches.  The 
in  loco  parentis  theory  has  long  been  doomed  — 
at  least  in  the  larger  institutions  —  and  so  far  as 
direct  observation  is  concerned,  the  professor  is 
as  ignorant  of  what  is  going  on  in  a  student's 
room  as  if  it  were  in  the  South  seas.  But  for 
all  that  he  can  make  skillful  guesses,  from  a  hun 
dred  signs,  and  when  the  Seniors  file  upon  the 
Commencement  platform  for  their  degrees,  that 
silent  circle  of  professors  often  know  them  better 
than  their  mothers  do.  It  is  pleasant  to  meet 
these  fellows  afterward,  either  on  the  old  cam 
pus,  or  at  some  remote  railway  junction,  or  at 
midnight  in  a  foreign  city,  and  pick  up  for  a 
moment  the  dropped  threads  of  acquaintance. 
Sometimes  one  learns  in  these  accidental  ways 
that  his  instruction  counted  for  more  than  was 
apparent  at  the  time ;  he  makes  the  discovery 
that  someone  has  taken  pains  to  remember  words 
that  he  himself  has  long  forgotten.  Herein  lies 
half  the  zest  of  teaching.  One  blazes  away  into 
the  underbrush,  left  barrel  and  right  barrel, 
vaguely  enough  as  it  seems,  but  some  of  the  shots 
are  sure  to  tell.  Young  men  are  after  all  so 


88  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

susceptible  to  impression,  so  responsive  to  right 
feeling,  that  though  the  fine  reserve  of  youth  may 
not  betray  it  at  the  moment,  they  nevertheless 
bear  away  from  their  instructor  the  best  he  has 
to  give  them.  This  may  be  poor  enough,  but  it 
is  something. 

When  a  professor  grows  tired  of  moralizing 
about  his  colleagues  or  his  pupils,  he  always  has 
the  president  to  fall  back  upon.  So  have  the 
undergraduates,  for  that  matter,  and  their  pa 
rents,  and  the  alumni,  and  the  trustees,  and  the 
general  public,  —  and  the  newspaper  reporters. 
The  college  president  who  can  conduct  himself 
to  the  satisfaction  of  this  varied  body  of  critics, 
and  enjoy  at  the  same  time  the  approval  of  his 
own  conscience,  is  a  gifted  man.  A  president 
must  have  many  qualifications  for  his  office  —  I 
have  heard  a  cautious  observer  say  —  but  his  first 
need  is  a  thick  skin.  Undoubtedly,  by  some  wise 
provision  of  nature,  the  skin  grows  thicker  with 
exposure,  but  there  is  a  curiously  prevalent  im 
pression  that  a  president's  conscience  is  liable  to 
a  corresponding  induration.  A  cynical-minded 
friend  of  mine,  of  large  discourse  in  these  mat 
ters,  avers  that  such  are  the  temptations  peculiar 


THE  LIFE   OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     89 

to  the  office,  that  of  all  the  college  presidents  he 
has  known,  only  two  remained  Christians.  These 
two  —  if  I  may  be  permitted  to  say  so  without 
discourtesy  to  the  others — are  both  dead. 

Whatever  be  the  foundation  for  such  impious 
generalizations,  no  one  will  deny  that  an  Ameri 
can  college  president  has  a  task  of  extraordinary 
difficulty.  Yet  his  problems  have  been  met,  upon 
the  whole,  with  consummate  skill.  Every  type  of 
president  has  done  something  to  advance  the 
cause  of  higher  education  in  America :  the  sleek 
"promoter,"  the  sectarian  fanatic,  the  close- 
mouthed  business  manager,  the  far-sighted  educa 
tor,  the  blameless  clergyman.  These  types  appear 
and  disappear  and  blend,  but  meantime  the  great 
cause  itself  goes  lumbering  steadily  forward. 

Two  generations  ago,  the  place  held  by  the 
college  professor  in  the  community  must  have 
vastly  tickled  his  vanity.  Those  rules  in  vogue  in 
New  England,  requiring  students  to  doff  their 
hats  when  four  rods  from  a  professor  (two  rods 
only  for  a  tutor,  alas !)  were  emblematic  of  the 
universal  homage  paid  him  in  a  college  town. 
I  suppose  there  is  no  man  so  great  nowadays, 
even  on  great  occasions,  as  those  old  fellows  were 


90  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

continuously.  Town  and  college  had  a  solid 
arity  of  interest  that  is  now  unknown,  except 
in  a  few  instances  of  fortunate  survival.  The 
commanding  position  of  the  professor  in  the  com 
munity  was  often  a  deserved  recognition  of  his 
services  to  the  local  public.  Here  and  there  may 
still  be  found  a  man  of  the  old  type,  an  agitator 
for  all  good  causes,  an  orator  in  town  meeting, 
a  politician  within  the  bounds  of  dignity,  but  it 
is  a  common  complaint  among  the  townspeople 
in  academic  communities  that  your  modern  pro 
fessor  is  a  Gallio.  He  may  turn  out  occasionally 
to  manifest  his  interest  in  some  crisis  of  the 
church  or  school  or  state,  but  in  general  he  sticks 
to  his  library.  This  criticism  is  often  short 
sighted,  particularly  in  reference  to  politics.  The 
professor  who  patiently  teaches  his  classes,  week 
in  and  week  out,  to  think  straight,  to  see  that  two 
and  two  make  four  on  either  side  of  the  Atlantic 
and  that  "  stealing  will  continue  stealing,"  serves 
his  country  better  than  a  hundred  "  spell-bind 
ers  "  in  the  last  frantic  days  of  a  campaign.  But 
upon  the  whole  there  is  ground  for  the  current 
complaint  as  to  the  college  teacher's  unconcern 
for  public  questions.  He  remains  in  one  sense  a 


THE  LIFE  OF  A  COLLEGE  PROFESSOR     91 

leading  figure  in  his  community.  There  are  cer 
tain  things  he  may  not  do  without  losing  caste. 
The  butcher,  with  a  vague  feeling  of  his  impor 
tance,  charges  him  a  couple  of  extra  cents  per 
pound,  and  the  suave  Armenian  refugee,  noting 
the  real  Bokhara  on  his  floor,  pockets  the  pro 
fessorial  gift  of  two  dollars  and  thinks  in  his 
Oriental  heart  that  it  ought  to  have  been  five. 
Yet  in  these  respects  he  may  be  a  marked  man 
—  unluckily !  —  without  possessing  any  of  the 
old,  real  leadership  of  influence  and  character. 
Plausible  as  may  be  his  excuses  of  preoccupa 
tion  with  wider  intellectual  interests,  the  tone  of 
American  civic  life  has  already  suffered  from  his 
indifference.  There  are  indications,  however,  of 
a  reaction  against  this  indolent  exclusiveness.  It 
may  be  that  the  hour  of  selfish  acquisition  and 
ungenerous  rivalry  between  the  colleges  is  pass 
ing,  and  that  side  by  side  they  are  to  strive  once 
more,  and  more  effectively  than  ever,  for  the  com 
mon  welfare.  Some  such  aspiration  is  certain  to 
thrill  sooner  or  later,  the  loneliest  scholar  in  the 
most  secluded  corner  of  the  college  world ;  for 
even  the  inveterate  pedant  may  possess  a  "  most 
public  soul." 


92  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

After  all  is  said,  the  life  of  a  college  professor 
presents,  under  curious  disguises,  the  old,  univer 
sal  issues.  It  is  a  noble  profession  for  the  noble- 
hearted,  and  but  a  petty  calling  for  a  man  of 
petty  mind. 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE 
PUBLIC 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE 
PUBLIC 

IN  a  recent  number  of  the  Harvard  Graduates' 
Magazine  there  is  a  sketch  entitled  "  A  Harvard 
Ascetic."  It  describes  that  singular  gentleman 
and  scholar,  Evangelinus  Apostolides  Sophocles, 
with  whose  academic  career  anecdote, and  myth 
have  long  been  busy.  For  some  thirty-six  years 
after  his  appointment  as  Greek  tutor,  in  1842, 
Professor  Sophocles  "  lived  by  himself,"  we  are 
told,  "  in  the  west  entry  of  Holworthy,  and  there 
cooked  and  spread  his  frugal  meals,  amid  his 
lexicons  and  papers  and  exercise  books."  Whether 
he  bred  his  famous  chickens  in  his  sleeping  room 
is  still  a  matter  for  high  debate  among  Cambridge 
humorists  of  an  antiquarian  turn.  At  any  rate 
he  seems  to  have  lived  his  own  life  in  serene  in 
difference  to  contemporary  opinion.  He  preserved 
throughout  the  most  stirring  period  of  the  last 
century  the  spiritual  isolation  of  the  exile.  He 
remained  from  first  to  last  a  Greek  monk,  set  to 


96  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

the  somewhat  incongruous  task  of  teaching  Amer 
ican  boys. 

I  am  so  unfortunate  as  never  to  have  known 
Evangelinus  Apostolides  Sophocles.  But  I  have 
often  been  inclined  to  moralize  upon  his  monastic 
existence,  in  comparing  it  with  the  fuller  if  more 
interrupted  lives  of  some  of  his  contemporaries 
and  pupils.  For  there  have  been  many  gramma 
rians  quite  as  anxious  as  Professor  Sophocles  to 
"  settle  Hoti's  business  "  and  impart  "  the  doc 
trine  of  the  enclitic  de"  who  have  cheerfully  sur 
rendered  their  scanty  hours  for  research  at  the 
call  of  public  service  ;  arguing  in  town  meetings 
for  better  schoolhouses  and  better  roads,  visiting 
and  burying  the  town  poor,  securing  better  terms 
from  the  all-invading  trolley  companies,  addressing 
legislative  committees  in  behalf  of  local  improve- 
ments,.'-"?  sparing,-4»*feoptv no  time  or  labor  where 
the  expenditure  of  time  and  labor  might  insure 
better  conditions  of  living  for  the  communities 
where  the  scholar's  lot  was  cast.  That  this  devo 
tion  to  the  claims  of  the  town  or  city  or  general 
public  is  likely  to  interfere  with  Hoti's  business 
is  undeniable.  The  doctrine  of  the  enclitic  de  is 
less  clearly  defined  to-day  than  it  might  have 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC  97 

been  if  all  college  teachers  had  lived,  like  Pro 
fessor  Sophocles,  in  the  west  entry  of  a  dormitory, 
engrossed  with  lexicons  and  exercise  books,  and 
with  a  few  chickens,  possibly,  to  add  speculative 
interest  to  the  scene.  There  is,  one  must  confess, 
a  more  or  less  constant  antinomy  between  the  in 
stincts  of  pure  scholarship  and  the  impulses  of 
citizenship.  It  is  a  warfare  which  accounts,  at 
least  in  part,  for  the  peculiar  status  of  the  college 
professor  under  the  conditions  of  contemporary 
American  life ;  and  certain  phases  of  the  rather 
""'  'Simplex  situation  growing  out  of  these  contradic 
tory  duties  one  may  venture  to  discuss. 

Few  educated  men  will  deny  the  imaginative 
charm  that  invests  the  existence  of  the  solitary 
scholar.  In  his  person  we  discover  one  man,  in 
this  confusing  world,  who  knows  what  he  likes. 
Chaucer's  Clerk  of  Oxenford,  who  had 

"  levere  have  at  his  beddes  heede 
Twenty  bookes,  clad  in  blak  or  reede 
Of  Aristotle  and  bis  philosophic 
Than  robes  riche,  or  fithele,  or  gay  sawtrie," 

is  something  more  than  a  type  of  mediaeval  devo 
tion  to  the  Aristotelian  logic.  Some  breath  of 
his  ascetic  spirit  still  abides  in  every  scholar  wor- 


98  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

thy  of  the  name ;  the  twenty  books  continue  to 
yield  to  such  a  man  a  deeper  delight  than  the 
robes  or  the  fiddle.  There  is  no  college  faculty 
without  its  Clerk  of  Oxenf ord,  —  some  unworldly 
soul  who  grows  old  without  tangible  rewards, 
possibly  without  very  tangible  achievements,  but 
who  has  nevertheless  kept  the  pure  flame  of 
learning  alive  in  his  heart.  Innocent  eccentri 
cities  attach  themselves  to  him.  Young  doctors 
from  the  great  foreign  and  American  universities 
find  him  a  trifle  old-fashioned  in  his  views  and 
unaware  of  the  latest  dissertations.  Yet  the 
blameless  Clerk  loves  his  twenty  books  to  the 
end. 

One  such  man  I  remember  in  particular.  In 
his  younger  days  he  had  been  a  Latinist,  until 
the  loss,  by  fire,  of  his  manuscript  Latin  gram 
mar  disheartened  him,  and  he  accepted  a  casual 
offer  of  a  chair  of  elementary  mathematics,  which 
he  kept  till  his  death.  He  fulfilled  his  duties  as 
instructor  with  perfect  gravity  and  fidelity,  but 
cared  wholly  for  other  things :  for  his  collections 
of  Phsedrus  and  black-letter  Chaucers ;  for  Scott's 
novels,  which  he  used  to  read  through  once  each 
year;  for  the  elder  dramatists;  for  Montaigne 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC    99 

and  Lamb.  Weather  permitting,  he  drove  from 
twenty  to  forty  miles  a  day  in  his  rusty,  mud- 
covered  buggy ;  he  knew  every  wild  flower,  every 
lovely  or  bold  view,  within  reach  of  Williams- 
town.  To  be  his  companion  upon  one  of  these 
drives  was  to  touch  the  very  essence  of  fine, 
whimsical,  irresponsible  scholarship.  But  Pro 
fessor  Dodd  made  no  speeches  in  town  meeting, 
was  scantily  interested  in  no-license  agitation, 
was  rather  likely  to  forget  election  day  alto 
gether,  and  on  pleasant  Sundays  used  to  patron 
ize  obscure  churches  that  lay  at  an  extraordinary 
driving  distance  from  home.  His  sense  of  freedom 
from  these  compulsions  that  are  laid  upon  the 
strenuous  citizen  of  New  England  was  very 
charming.  The  land  of  his  habitation  was  "  far 
from  this  our  war." 

The  type  of  moral  detachment  which  my  old 
f rien cf  thus  exemplified  is  not  only  charming ;  it 
is  positively  necessary,  if  the  work  demanded  by 
productive  scholarship  —  though  he  was  quite 
frankly  an  unproductive  scholar !  —  is  adequately 
to  be  done.  It  is  an  encumbrance  to  the  scholar, 
as  it  is  to  the  soldier,  to  entangle  himself  over 
much  with  the  affairs  of  this  life.  Certain  mem- 


100  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

bers  of  every  academic  community  seem  drafted 
by  nature  and  by  achievement  to  special  service. 
They  are  summoned  out  of  the  usual  social  order, 
away  from  the  conventional,  wholesome  round  of 
ordinary  discipline,  to  lead  some  forlorn  hope  of 
science  or  letters,  to  explore  the  farthest  bound 
aries  of  human  knowledge,  to  chart  unknown 
waters  that  will  by  and  by  be  crowded  with  the 
funnels  of  the  carrying  trade  of  the  world.  There 
is  a  profound  sense  in  which  every  such  man 
must,  like  Newton,  be 

"  forever 
Voyaging  through  strange  seas  of  thought  alone." 

He  cannot  keep  in  touch  with  the  normal  life  of 
other  men.  If  he  brings  back  something  to  us  at 
the  end  of  his  voyages,  that  is  enough ;  he  must 
not  be  held  to  rigid  attendance  upon  ward  meet 
ings  and  Sunday  school.  The  chances  are  that 
not  twenty  men  in  the  world  will  recognize,  at 
first,  what  these  explorations  mean  to  human 
progress ;  their  significance  is  realized  very  grad 
ually.  Meantime  the  man's  neighbors  will  know 
merely  that  he  is  gone,  —  that  he  is  absent- 
minded,  forgetful  of  jury  duty  and  registration 
and  a  hundred  admirable  "  causes." 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC     101 

Since  this  type  of  intellectual  pioneer  is  so 
essential  to  the  true  progress  of  the  race,  there  is 
no  likelihood  that  it  will  not  persist.  Indeed, 
there  are  more  opportunities  open  to  it  and 
greater  honors  are  paid  to  it  to-day,  in  this  coun 
try,  than  we  have  ever  offered  before.  The  Clerk 
of  Oxenford,  who  was  "  not  right  fat,"  as  it  may 
be  remembered,  in  the  fourteenth  century,  is  bet 
ter  clothed  and  fed  and  housed  in  the  twentieth. 
Yet  the  college  teachers  who  really  make  original 
contributions  to  human  knowledge  are  few  in 
proportion  to  the  total  numbers  engaged  in  the 
profession.  The  passion  for  scholarship,  like  that 
for  poetry,  does  not  always  imply  a  correspond 
ing  power  of  production;  and  because  we  are 
glad  to  release  some  picked  man  from  the  com 
mon  social  obligations  and  services,  and  bid  him 
Godspeed  upon  his  adventure,  it  does  not  follow 
that  a  similar  freedom  may  be  claimed  for  those 
who  stay  at  home.  The  solitary  scholar  will  al 
ways  be  the  exception,  not  the  rule.  The  college 
professor,  under  normal  conditions,  can  escape 
neither  his  duties  to  the  public  nor  the  daily  irre 
sistible  impact  from  the  public.  His  endeavor  to 
escape  them  may  be  an  evidence  of  instinctive 


102  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

capacity  for  creative  work  of  the  highest  value ; 
but  it  has  not  infrequently  been  the  badge  of  a 
mere  Bohemianism,  a  mark  of  the  reckless,  self 
ish  existence  of  an  alien,  —  of  a  man  with  no 
stake  in  the  community. 

"I  do  not  often  speak  to  public  questions," 
said  Emerson,  who,  without  formal  academic  re 
lations,  was  nevertheless  in  so  many  ways  our 
finest  type  of  academic  behavior :  "  they  are  odi 
ous  and  hurtful,  and  it  seems  like  meddling  or 
leaving  your  work.  I  have  my  own  spirits  in 
prison,  —  spirits  in  deeper  prisons,  whom  no  man 
visits  if  I  do  not.  And  then  I  see  what  havoc  it 
makes  with  any  good  mind,  a  dissipated  philan 
thropy.  The  one  thing  not  to  be  forgiven  to  intel 
lectual  persons  is,  not  to  know  their  own  task." 

Yet  these  serene  sentences  were  uttered  at  the 
opening  of  his  address  on  the  Fugitive  Slave 
Law,  and  he  goes  on  to  say  that  he  never  felt 
the  crack  of  the  slaveowner's  whip  until  that 
measure,  backed  as  it  was  by  Daniel  Webster, 
put  a  check  on  his  free  speech  and  action.  Then, 
with  words  fairly  incandescent  with  noble  scorn, 
Emerson  denounces  a  law  which  he  believes  to 
be  an  outrage  alike  upon  the  rights  of  private 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC    103 

citizenship  and  upon  the  public  honor.  That 
speech  upon  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law  deserves  to 
be  read  with  the  more  famous  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
oration  of  1837  on  the  American  Scholar.  The 
earlier  address  describes  the  scholar's  duty  to 
ward  his  work;  the  speech  of  1854  states  and 
exemplifies  the  scholar's  duty  as  a  citizen. 

Scarcely  half  a  century  has  elapsed  since  these 
later  words  of  Emerson  were  spoken.  Yet  what 
far-reaching  changes  have  been  wrought  in  the 
relations  of  the  academic  scholar  to  the  public ! 
Many  of  the  most  characteristic  phases  of  our 
modern  industrial  and  social  development  are 
less  than  half  a  century  old.  Within  that  period 
the  curriculum  of  the  American  college  has  been 
transformed.  The  professor  of  to-day,  instead  of 
occupying  himself  solely  with  the  dead  languages 
and  a  little  mathematics  and  philosophy,  pursues 
studies  and  gives  instruction  that  bring  him  into 
touch,  at  a  thousand  points  of  contact,  with  the 
material  interests,  the  practical  concerns,  of  the 
American  public.  Some  Evangelinus  Aposto- 
lides  Sophocles  still  trims  his  solitary  lamp  in 
every  college;  and  in  every  college  there  are 
still,  as  always,  men  whose  instincts  of  citizen- 


104  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

ship  are  wholly  independent  of  the  work  of  their 
particular  department.  But  a  newer  type  of  col 
lege  professor  is  also  everywhere  in  evidence :  the 
expert  who  knows  all  about  railroads  and  bridges 
and  subways;  about  gas  commissions  and  elec 
trical  supplies;  about  currency  and  banking, 
Philippine  tariffs,  Venezuelan  boundary  lines, 
the  industries  of  Porto  Kico,  the  classification  of 
the  civil  service,  the  control  of  trusts.  I  take  my 
illustrations  almost  at  random,  and  yet  in  con 
nection  with  each  topic  upon  that  variegated  list 
it  would  be  possible  to  point  to  college  professors 
who  have  lately  been  rendering  a  signal  public 
service.  These  men  combine  technical  training 
with  practical  capacity.  They  can  no  longer  be 
brushed  aside  contemptuously  as  "mere  theor 
ists."  They  are  helping  to  carry  forward  the  de 
tailed  work  of  governmental  departments ;  and 
as  you  and  I  are  paying  for  their  traveling 
expenses  and  their  stenographers,  they  ought  to 
meet  every  American  definition  of  "  the  practical 
man  " ! 

And  we  must  take  into  account  other  facts  be 
sides  these  new  professorial  activities  springing 
out  of  the  new  scientific  and  commercial  energy 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC  105 

of  the  nation.  This  energy  has  been  felt  by  the 
universities,  and  it  has  produced  university  men 
who,  judged  by  any  previous  academic  stand 
ards,  belong  to  a  new  species.  But  the  college 
professor  who  represents  the  "  humanities  "  rather 
than  the  distinctly  scientific  side  of  modern  edu 
cation,  is  likewise  brought  closer  to  the  public 
than  ever  before.  The  newspapers  report  —  and 
misreport  —  him.  Editors  offer  him  space  to  re 
ply.  Publishers  weary  him  with  appeals  to  write 
text-books.  He  goes  to  conventions.  He  has  be 
come  sophisticated.  The  great  festivals  of  his 
university  —  like  the  rural  college  Commence 
ments  of  sixty  years  ago  —  assume  the  character 
of  a  popular  show.  The  President  of  the  United 
States  attends  them.  The  professor's  photograph, 
in  full  academic  costume,  assaults  your  eye  in  the 
market-place.  The  college  press  club  and  the 
university's  bureau  of  publicity  give  his  lecture 
dates  in  advance.  The  prospectus  of  your  favor 
ite  magazine  bids  you  inspect  his  literary  qualifi 
cations  as  well  as  his  thoughtful  countenance. 
WTio's  Who  in  America  informs  you  of  the  name 
of  his  second  wife. 

In  all  this  familiarity  of  intercourse  with  the 


106  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

world,  some  of  the  fine  old  reserve  of  manner  and 
reticence  of  speech  has  been  lost.  The  secular 
ized  professor  —  like  one  of  those  gray  Italian 
convents  now  secularized  into  orphan  schools  — 
is  sometimes  rather  a  noisy,  middle-class  affair. 
Yet  if  something  of  the  traditional  fastidiousness 
and  exclusiveness  has  disappeared,  other  quali 
ties,  more  robust,  and  probably  more  useful,  have 
been  gained.  It  has  been  an  advantage  to  the 
public  to  see  the  professor  at  closer  range,  and  it 
has  been  a  still  more  obvious  benefit  to  the  pro 
fessor  himself  that  he  has  found  manifold  modes 
of  contact  with  his  fellow  citizens.  For  the  les 
sons  which  the  professor  learns  from  the  public 
are  at  least  as  important  as  those  which  he  imparts. 
If,  as  the  cant  phrase  has  it,  he  does  something 
occasionally  to  "  purify  politics,"  politics  pretty 
constantly  clarifies  him. 

This  growth  in  mutual  knowledge  between  a 
single  class  in  the  community  and  the  community 
as  a  whole  has  already  proved  its  value,  but  the 
limits  of  its  usefulness  have  by  no  means  been 
reached.  Popular  suspicion  of  the  political  theo 
rist —  a  suspicion  curiously  active  at  the  pres 
ent  moment  —  is  still  apt  to  find  in  the  "  college 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC    107 

professor "  a  convenient  symbol  of  ineptitude. 
The  Philistinism  which  glorifies  the  so-called 
"  man  of  action  "  minimizes  by  contrast  the  man 
of  thought.  Nor  is  it  to  be  expected  that  the 
general  public  can  ever  develop  a  full  sympathy 
with  the  academic  scholar  whose  mind  is  bent 
solely  upon  discovering  the  truth.  It  may  respect 
him  if  he  keeps  out  of  the  way.  But  let  him  once 
lift  his  voice  against  some  popular  movement, 
and  the  hisses  will  be  prompt  enough.  Most  of 
us  can  remember  the  time  when  college  professors 
of  economics  who  advocated  tariff  for  revenue 
were  stigmatized  as  "  British  emissaries  "  with 
their  pockets  stuffed  with  "  British  gold."  There 
is  less  said  just  now  about  British  emissaries,  and 
yet  the  college  economist  who  does  not,  in  football 
parlance,  "  buy  the  winning  colors  after  the  game  " 
must  still  pay  the  penalty  of  his  hardihood.  Col 
lege  teachers  have  been  openly  denounced  as 
"  traitors "  for  advocating  self-government  for 
the  Filipinos.  In  many  a  pulpit  and  newspaper 
office,  it  was  declared  that  the  utterances  of  col 
lege  professors  were  largely  responsible  for  the 
assassination  of  President  McKinley.  Singularly 
enough,  the  most  bitter  denunciations  of  the  col- 


108  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

lege  professor  in  politics  come  from  college-trained 
politicians  and  journalists ;  there  is  no  such  mas 
ter  of  the  sneer  as  the  partisan  who  in  his  youth 

"  did  eagerly  frequent 
Doctor  and  saint." 

In  short,  courage  is  still  necessary  if  the  college 
teacher  desires  to  speak  frankly  upon  disputable 
topics.  In  1904  it  is  easy  to  be  a  champion  of 
the  gold  standard,  because  the  gold  standard  has 
fortunately  prevailed ;  in  1896  the  comfort  of 
such  a  championship  depended  upon  the  longitude 
of  the  college.  We  are  gradually  learning  to 
analyze  the  complex  elements  that  enter  into  the 
question  of  "  academic  freedom,"  and  to  discover 
that  human  nature  must  not  be  left  out  of  the 
reckoning ;  but  meantime  it  must  be  confessed 
that  academic  freedom,  like  the  Supreme  Court 
in  Mr.  Dooley's  epigram,  "follows  the  election 
returns." 

Yet  there  is  something  to  be  said  for  that 
instinct  of  self-preservation  which  forces  the  ma 
jority,  in  a  democracy  like  ours,  to  silence  demon 
strative  opposition,  and  proceed  with  the  public 
affairs.  One  must  admit  that  a  good  many  college 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC    109 

professors  have  taken  the  Irish  members  of  Par 
liament  as  their  exemplars,  and  are  boyishly 
pleased  if  they  can  merely  obstruct  the  business 
of  the  House.  Miss  Fanny  Burney  once  wrote 
of  Sir  Philip  Jennings  Clerk,  "  He  is  a  professed 
minority  man."  This  type  of  man  is  familiar  in 
academic  circles.  There  is  something  very  ad 
mirable  in  his  bravery,  in  his  consistency,  and  in 
the  Cato-like  —  the  Oxford-like  —  pride  with 
which  he  clings  to  lost  causes.  But,  like  all  of 
us,  he  needs  to  discriminate.  John  Milton,  who 
was  "  a  professed  minority  man  "  of  the  most 
militant  order,  declared  that  "when  God  com 
mands  to  take  the  trumpet,  and  blow  a  dolorous 
or  a  jarring  blast,  it  lies  not  in  man's  will  what 
he  shall  say  or  what  he  shall  conceal."  Noble, 
heartening  words  are  these,  and  as  much  needed 
now  as  ever.  Yet  there  should  be  a  reasonable 
certainty  that  the  note  is  really  blown  at  God's 
command ;  and  one  may  concede  that  the  pro 
fessed  minority  man  of  the  academic  species  some 
times  mistakes  for  the  Divine  clarion  what  is 
merely  a  tin  trumpet  hanging  on  the  wall  of  his 
private  study,  and  that  he  blows  it  mainly  for  the 
exercise  of  his  lungs. 


110  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

It  is  easy  to  comprehend,  and  it  should  be  easy 
to  pardon,  these  professorial  extravagances.  They 
are  the  excitable  utterances  of  men  not  habitually 
sobered  by  practical  contact  with  affairs.  Yet  an 
excited  participation  in  public  debate  is  better, 
after  all,  than  indifference  ;  and  as  the  solidarity 
of  interests  between  all  classes  in  the  republic 
becomes  more  generally  realized,  there  is  likely 
to  be  less  and  less  criticism  of  academic  critics. 
While  making  fullest  admission  of  the  occasional 
peevishness  and  exaggeration  of  these  men,  it 
should  never  be  forgotten  that  no  class  of  Ameri 
can  citizens  bring  to  the  discussion  of  current 
questions  so  wide  a  knowledge  of  the  teachings 
of  history,  a  deeper  attachment  to  American 
ideals,  and  a  more  disinterested  patriotism. 

The  field  of  political  activity  has  been  selected 
to  illustrate  some  of  the  relations  of  the  professor 
with  the  public,  not  only  because  the  illustration 
lies  conveniently  near  at  hand,  but  also  because 
it  is  typical  of  other  activities  as  well.  The  bene 
fits  that  have  attended  the  more  general  partici 
pation  of  college  teachers  in  current  politics  are 
undeniable.  They  justify  the  belief  that  many  of 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC  111 

the  obstructions  which  still  embarrass  the  com 
merce  of  the  professor  with  the  public  will  disap 
pear  upon  better  mutual  acquaintance.  There  are 
many  spheres  of  public  activity  in  which  college 
teachers  need  encounter  none  of  the  suspicion 
that  is  bred  by  partisan  politics.  In  the  fight  for 
better  tenements,  for  public  parks,  bath-houses, 
libraries,  and  training-schools  ;  in  all  the  varied 
work  of  philanthropic,  ethical,  and  religious 
organizations  ;  in  the  immense  task  of  securing 
and  developing  throughout  this  country  a  respect 
for  law,  a  man  is  not  handicapped  because  he 
earns  his  living  in  a  college.  He  will  discover,  if 
he  makes  the  effort,  that  he  can  come  to  closer 
quarters  with  his  fellow  Americans,  not  only 
without  abandoning  any  old  ideals  worth  keeping, 
but  with  the  certainty  of  obtaining  an  invigorat 
ing  supply  of  new  ideals.  His  working  hours  may 
be  devoted  to  investigation  or  to  classroom  in 
struction  ;  he  may  hope  to  influence  his  generation 
through  his  pupils  or  through  his  books  ;  but  he 
will  have  at  least  certain  moments  of  leisure. 
These  may  be  spent,  if  he  will,  in  widening  his 
knowledge  of  the  American  people  of  to-day. 
I  have  already  referred  to  one  delightful  Wil- 


112  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

liamstown  personage,  the  late  Professor  Dodd,  as 
an  instance  of  academic  detachment.  I  shall 
choose  a  phrase  descriptive  of  a  more  normal 
scheme  of  life  from  a  remark  made  about  another 
resident  of  the  Berkshire  college  town,  named 
"  Kuss  "  Pratt.  He  was  the  one-armed  and  more 
stupid  brother  of  the  half-witted  and  locally 
famous  "Bill"  Pratt.  As  Russ  was  reputed 
to  be  the  laziest  man  in  Williamstown,  —  a  vil 
lage  that  had  many  claimants  to  that  distinction, 
—  I  once  asked  his  adopted  daughter  how  her 
father  spent  his  time.  Her  answer  was  epigram 
matic  in  its  swiftness  and  scope:  "He  saws 
wood,  sets  in  the  house,  and  goes  down  street !  " 
Is  not  that  an  admirable  formula?  Labor,  re 
flection,  social  contact !  Could  there  be  a  wiser 
counsel  of  perfection  for  the  college  professor? 
Poor  fellow,  he  must  "  saw  wood  "  or  freeze  ;  yet 
he  has  some  opportunity  to  reflect,  in  a  world 
which  is  just  now  little  enough  given  to  reflec 
tion  ;  and  surely  he  might  "  go  down  street " 
more  often  and  to  better  advantage  than  he  does. 
The  street  no  less  than  the  library  has  its  whims, 
partialities,  extravagances,  panics.  But  the  man 
of  the  library  has  much  to  learn  from  the  man  of 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC  113 

the  street,  and  a  riper  friendship  between  them 
will  betoken  a  better  service  toward  their  com 
mon  country. 

A  friend  of  James  Russell  Lowell  has  said 
that  in  Lowell's  later  life  he  sometimes  spoke 
discontentedly  of  the  years  he  had  spent  as  a  col 
lege  professor.  He  complained  humorously  that 
he  had  been  wont,  in  those  earlier  days,  to  lec 
ture  for  an  hour  or  two,  go  back  to  Elmwood, 
fill  his  pipe,  and  thank  God  that  he  had  done  a 
day's  work.  Now  it  is  not  easy  to  say  what  shall 
constitute  a  day's  work,  either  for  one's  self  or 
for  another ;  the  question  is  not  so  simple  as  the 
arithmetic  of  the  labor  unions  would  seem  to 
imply.  Yet  that  is  a  scant  day's  work,  whether 
long  or  short,  that  does  not  bring  the  worker 
into  some  relation  to  human  progress ;  that  does 
not  make  men  and  women  freer,  wiser,  better. 
Lowell's  years  of  service  in  the  Smith  Professor 
ship  may  have  been  as  fruitful  as  any  years  of 
his  life,  although  it  was  the  nobler  side  of  him, 
no  doubt,  that  made  him  question  it. 

But  who  knows  the  pattern  into  which  his  days 
and  years  are  being  woven  ?  I  remember  com 
plaining,  long  ago,  to  a  venerable  professor,  as 


114  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

we  were  walking  together  to  morning  chapel, 
that  a  required  chapel  service  involved  a  costly 
expenditure  of  time;  and  that  the  German 
scholars  were  steadily  drawing  ahead  of  their 
American  rivals  because,  for  one  reason,  they 
saved  that  half  hour  a  day.  His  reply  was  very 
fine :  "  If  you  are  turning  a  grindstone,  every 
moment  is  precious ;  but  if  you  are  doing  a 
man's  work,  the  inspired  moments  are  precious." 
Every  fully  endowed  man  believes  that  saying  in 
his  heart,  whatever  he  may  think  about  the  spe 
cific  question  of  compulsory  chapel  for  the  col 
lege-bred  ;  and  as  our  modern  world  gradually 
reveals  to  us  both  its  complexity  and  its  spiritual 
unity,  the  "  inspired  moments  "  are  increasingly 
likely  to  be  those,  not  of  lonely  intuition,  but  of 
organized  social  service.  No  Americans,  above 
all,  no  body  of  educated  Americans,  should 
imagine  that  they  have  a  charter  to  live  unto 
themselves.  The  whole  contemporary  movement 
is  against  it,  —  the  secularization  of  knowledge, 
the  democratization  of  society,  the  fundamental 
oneness  of  interest  among  all  peoples  of  this 
swiftly  narrowing  earth.  For  the  members  of 
any  profession  to  insulate  themselves  from  these 


COLLEGE  PROFESSORS  AND  THE  PUBLIC    115 

currents  of  world-sympathy  is  to  cut  off  that  pro 
fession's  power.  The  astonishing  development  of 
academic  studies  in  our  day,  the  evolution  of 
these  new  types  of  professorial  activity,  the  im 
mense  endowments  and  other  evidences  of  public 
interest  in  the  American  college,  are  fortunate 
auguries  for  the  republic.  But  they  are  also  wel 
come  because  they  invite  the  professor  himself  to 
make  generous  contribution  to  what  the  Presi 
dent  of  Harvard,  in  speaking  at  the  bicentennial 
of  Yale,  characterized  as  "  the  pervasive,  aggres 
sive,  all-modifying  spirit  of  Christian  democracy." 


HAWTHOKNE  AT  NOKTH  ADAMS 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS 

THE  westward-bound  passenger  on  the  Fitchburg 
Railroad,  emerging  from  the  long  roar  of  the 
Hoosac  Tunnel,  sees  the  smoke-blurred  electric 
lamps  quenched  in  sudden  daylight,  shuts  his 
watch,  and  finds  himself  in  North  Adams.  The 
commercial  travelers  leave  the  car,  and  a  boy 
comes  in  with  the  Troy  papers.  A  grimy  station 
hides  the  close-built  town,  though  upon  the  left 
one  can  see  row  above  row  of  boarding-houses 
clinging  to  the  face  of  a  rocky  foothill  of  Grey- 
lock,  and  further  to  the  south  a  bit  of  meadow 
land  not  yet  covered  with  railroad  sidings.  Then 
the  train  moves  on,  and  in  a  moment  plunges 
into  another  tunnel,  and  so  out  of  the  Tunnel 
City. 

Thirty  years  ago,  the  traveler's  first  glimpse 
of  North  Adams  was  more  picturesque.  The  big 
six-horse  coaches,  starting  from  Rice's,  away 
over  in  the  winding  valley  of  the  Deerfield,  and 
climbing  Hoosac  Mountain,  used  to  swing  at  full 


120  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

gallop  along  the  two  or  three  miles  of  tableland 
on  the  summit  of  the  range,  past  the  queer  old 
houses  of  Florida,  the  highest  township  in  Mas 
sachusetts,  and  pull  up  for  a  moment  where  the 
road  turned  sharply  down  the  western  slope.  On 
the  right  were  the  last  reluctant  spurs  of  the 
Green  Mountains ;  directly  in  front,  over  the 
broad  Williamstown  valley,  stretched  the  clear- 
cut  Taconics ;  at  the  left  rose  the  massive  lines 
of  Greylock.  At  one's  feet,  far  below,  were  two 
or  three  church  spires,  and  the  smoke  of  facto 
ries.  Tiny  houses  were  already  perching  here 
and  there  on  the  steep  sides  of  the  mill  streams ; 
for  North  Adams  has  no  site  whatever,  and  from 
the  beginning  has  had  to  climb  for  its  life.  Com 
pletely  enfolded  by  hills  as  the  village  seemed, 
one  could  yet  catch  a  glimpse,  as  the  driver  gath 
ered  up  his  reins  for  the  long  descent,  of  a  val 
ley  extending  southward,  between  Ragged  Moun 
tain  and  the  Hoosac  range,  toward  the  towns  of 
lower  Berkshire. 

It  was  up  this  valley,  more  than  half  a  century 
ago,  that  the  Pittsfield  stage  brought  Hawthorne 
to  North  Adams.  He  was  taking,  in  rather  aim 
less  fashion,  one  of  those  summer  outings,  which 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       121 

gave  him  more  pleasure,  he  said,  than  other 
people  had  in  the  whole  year  beside.  Nothing 
drew  him  to  northern  Berkshire,  apparently, 
except  the  mere  chance  of  travel ;  but  he  found 
the  place  congenial,  and  there  are  facts  con 
nected  with  his  stay  there  that  throw  a  clear 
light  upon  Hawthorne,  at  a  period  critical  both 
for  himself  and  his  art.  There  are  persons  still 
living  who  well  remember  his  sojourn  in  North 
Adams.  His  favorite  companions  were  men 
prominent  in  the  little  community,  and  of  such 
marked  personal  qualities  that  story  and  legend 
are  busy  with  them  to  this  hour  ;  so  that  even  if 
the  graphic  delineations  of  the  American  Note- 
Books  were  not  at  hand,  one  might  still  form  a 
fairly  accurate  picture  of  the  North  Adams  of 
1838. 

Halfway  down  the  straggling  main  street,  upon 
the  site  of  the  present  Wilson  House,  was  a  noted 
inn,  called  either  after  its  proprietor,  Smith's 
Tavern,  or  according  to  its  politics,  the  Whig 
Tavern,  or  else,  and  more  pretentiously,  the  North 
Adams  House.  Those  were  the  days  of  Martin 
Van  Buren,  and  the  Democratic,  or  Waterman 
Tavern,  was  across  the  way,  on  the  corner  now 


122  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

occupied  by  the  Richmond  House.  But  Haw 
thorne,  though  on  the  very  eve  of  becoming  a 
Democratic  office-holder,  weakly  yielded  to  the 
attractions  of  the  Whig  Tavern,  being  doubtless 
lured  by  the  reputation  of  Orrin  Smith  as  a 
hotel-keeper.  Up  to  the  many-pillared  piazza  of 
Smith's  Tavern  drove  the  stages  from  Greenfield 
and  Pittsfield,  from  Troy  and  Albany.  The  broad 
stoop  was  the  favorite  loafing-place  of  the  village 
characters.  Here  sat  mild-mannered  Captain 
Carter,  with  butternut  meats  and  maple  sugar 
for  sale  in  little  tin  measures,  which  Hawthorne 
has  described  with  curious  precision ;  and  which 
descended,  by  the  way,  after  the  captain's  death, 
to  a  well-known  vagrant  in  the  adjoining  village 
of  Williamstown.  Hither  hobbled  "  Uncle  John  " 
Sheldon,  the  Eevolutionary  pensioner.  Here  was 
to  be  found  the  one-armed  soap-maker,  Daniel 
Haynes,  nicknamed  "  Black  Hawk,"  who  had 
once  been  a  lawyer,  and  had  been  ruined  by 
drink,  though  there  was  still  "  a  trace  of  the  gen 
tleman  and  man  of  intellect "  in  him.  And  here, 
accompanied  by  his  Newfoundland  dog,  was  the 
brandy-possessed  "  Doctor  Bob  "  Robinson,  a  sort 
of  fearless  and  savage  Falstaff,  the  fame  of  whose 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       123 

single  combats  and  evil  ways  and  miraculous  gifts 
of  healing  lingers  even  yet  in  the  Tunnel  City. 

Along  the  piazza,  or  within  the  hospitable  bar 
room,  sat  village  worthies  of  a  higher  grade  : 
Otis  Hodge  the  millwright,  Orrin  Witherell  the 
blacksmith,  Squire  Putnam  and  Squire  Drury 
and  the  rest,  filling  their  broad-bottomed  chairs 
with  the  dignity  acquired  by  years  of  habitude. 
Jovial  old  fellows  were  these  patrons  of  the  Whig 
Tavern,  —  Khode  Island  Baptists,  most  of  them, 
—  hard-handed  and  level-headed,  with  hearty 
laughs  and  strongly  flavored  stories,  with  coarse 
appetites  for  meat  and  drink,  and  "  a  tendency 
to  obesity."  Doubtless  they  scrutinized  each  new 
arrival,  drew  shrewd  inferences  as  to  his  occupa 
tion  and  character,  and  decided  whether  he  was 
worthy  of  their  intimacy.  We  do  not  know  their 
first  impressions  of  the  young  man  who  stepped 
out  of  the  Pittsfield  stage  on  the  26th  of  July, 
but  there  is  every  evidence  that  he  was  strongly 
attracted  to  these  broad-backed  tavern-haunters, 
and  was  promptly  initiated  into  their  circle. 
Curiously  enough,  their  new  friend  was  the  most 
delicately  imaginative  genius  this  country  has 
yet  produced ;  gifted  with  such  elusive  qualities, 


124  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

such  swift,  bright,  fairy-like  fancies,  that  his  col 
lege  mates  had  nicknamed  him  "  Oberon ; "  so 
shy  and  solitary  that  for  years  he  had  scarcely 
gone  upon  the  streets  of  his  native  town  except  at 
night ;  so  modest  that  he  concealed  his  identity 
as  a  story-writer  under  a  dozen  different  signa 
tures  ;  with  a  personal  reserve  so  absolute  and 
insistent  that  no  liberty  was  ever  taken  with 
him ;  beautiful  in  face  and  form,  fresh-hearted 
and  pure-souled.  A  strange  associate,  indeed, 
for  Orrin  Witherell  and  Otis  Hodge,  Orrin  Smith 
and  "Doctor  Bob "  Kobinson !  Kagged,  one-armed 
"Black  Hawk,"  soap-boiler  and  phrenologist, 
stopped  in  his  "  wild  and  ruined  and  desperate 
talk  "  to  look  at  the  new  guest.  "  My  study  is 
man,"  he  said.  "  I  do  not  know  your  name,  but 
there  is  something  of  the  hawk-eye  about  you, 
too."  And  thus  the  two  students  of  man  entered 
into  fellowship. 

Hawthorne  tarried  at  the  North  Adams  House 
until  the  llth  of  September.  He  bathed  in  the 
pools  along  Hudson's  Brook,  and  climbed  the  hills 
at  sunset.  He  chatted  on  the  tavern  stoop  with 
"  Uncle  John  "  Sheldon  and  with  Captain  Carter, 
of  whose  name  he  was  not  quite  certain,  and 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       125 

which  he  enters  in  the  journal  as  "  I  believe, 
Capt.  Gavett."  On  rainy  days  he  sat  in  the  bar 
room  and  consorted  with  Methodistical  cattle 
drovers,  stage  agents,  agents  for  religious  and 
abolition  newspapers,  and  an  extraordinary  va 
riety  of  other  people.  He  attended  court,  the 
menagerie,  and  the  funeral  of  a  child.  Some 
times  he  took  brief  excursions  in  the  neighbor 
hood  ;  as,  for  instance,  to  the  Williams  Com 
mencement.  Here  he  might  have  seen  Mark 
Hopkins,  presiding  for  the  second  time,  flanked 
by  dignitaries  of  the  church  and  state ;  he  might 
have  listened  to  twenty-three  orations,  upon 
themes  of  which  The  Influence  of  Deductive  and 
Inductive  Habits  on  the  Character,  by  William 
Bross,  and  The  Effect  of  Music  on  the  Feelings, 
by  Henry  M.  Field,  are  perhaps  fair  examples,  — 
to  say  nothing  of  the  polished  periods  of  the  Rev. 
Orville  Dewey's  address  before  the  alumni.  But, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  this  conscienceless  graduate 
of  Bowdoin  apparently  spent  most  of  his  time 
behind  the  church,  watching  the  peddlers  and 
the  negroes.  The  only  evidence  that  he  entered 
the  big  white  meeting-house  at  all  is  his  remark 
that  there  were  well-dressed  ladies  there,  "  the 


126  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

sunburnt  necks  in  contiguity  with  the  delicate 
fabrics  of  the  dresses  showing  the  yeoman's 
daughters." 

Some  of  the  people  with  whom  the  usually 
taciturn  Hawthorne  conversed,  in  the  course  of 
his  walks  and  drives,  made  a  deep  impression 
upon  his  imagination.  Of  an  old  man  whose 
children  were  connected  with  a  circus  establish 
ment,  he  noted,  as  Wordsworth  might  have  done, 
"  While  this  old  man  is  wandering  among  the 
hills,  his  children  are  the  gaze  of  multitudes." 
On  the  top  of  Hoosac  Mountain  he  met,  one  day, 
a  German  Jew,  traveling  with  a  diorama.  After 
Hawthorne  had  looked  at  it,  a  curious  elderly 
dog  made  his  appearance,  which  the  romance- 
writer  has  described  with  such  extreme  fidelity 
as  to  give  Mr.  Henry  James  the  impression  of  a 
"  general  vacancy  in  the  field  of  Hawthorne's 
vision,"  although  it  will  appear  that  Hawthorne 
knew  what  he  was  about.  One  moonlight  night 
he  ascended  the  mountain  side,  startling  the 
lonely  watcher  by  one  of  those  huge  lime-kilns 
that  then,  and  for  many  'years,  abounded  near 
North  Adams ;  and,  going  up  to  the  top  of  the 
kiln,  the  future  author  of  Ethan  Brand  gazed 


HAWTHORNE   AT  NORTH  ADAMS       127 

down  upon  the  red-hot  marble,  burning  with  its 
"  bluish,  lambent  flame."  Experiences  like  this 
were  destined  to  reappear,more  or  less  transformed, 
in  his  creative  work ;  but  often  the  incidents 
recorded  in  the  journal  are  of  the  very  simplest 
character,  as,  for  instance,  the  fact  that  two  little 
girls,  bearing  tin  pails,  who  met  him  on  the  Notch 
road,  "  whispered  one  another  and  smiled." 

North  Adams  is  a  strange  place,  after  all,  to 
find  Oberon  in,  —  Oberon,  the  king  of  the  fairies. 
We  are  not  likely  to  understand  the  secret  of 
Hawthorne's  stay  there  unless  we  remember  that 
the  summer  of  1838  was  the  most  important 
epoch  of  his  life. 

What  is  first  to  be  observed  in  the  North 
Adams  portion  of  the  American  Note-Books  is 
the  professional  point  of  view.  The  writer  is  an 
artist  in  search  of  material.  "  Conceive  some 
thing  tragical  to  be  talked  about,"  he  adds,  after 
describing  the  old  man  whose  children  were  in 
the  circus,  "and  much  might  be  made  of  this 
interview  in  a  wild  road  among  the  hills."  He 
notes  elsewhere :  "  A  little  boy  named  Joe,  who 
haunts  about  the  bar-room  and  the  stoop,  four 
years  old,  in  a  thin,  short  jacket,  and  full-breeched 


128  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

trousers,  and  bare  feet.  .  .  .  Take  this  boy  as 
the  germ  of  a  tavern-haunter,  a  country  roue,  to 
spend  a  wild  and  brutal  youth,  ten  years  of  his 
prime  in  the  state  prison,  and  his  old  age  in  the 
poorhouse."  Thus  generously  does  the  Hawthorne 
who  himself  haunts  the  Whig  Tavern  suggest  to 
that  other  Hawthorne  who  invents  stories  that  he 
might  "  take  this  boy."  The  suggestion  was 
adopted,  though  Joe  was  not  made  to  run  through 
the  melancholy  course  so  vividly  outlined  for 
him ;  and  readers  of  the  Note-Books,  who  have 
wondered  what  ever  became  of  the  little  fellow,  — 
whose  real  name  was  not  Joe,  but  Edward, — 
will  doubtless  be  glad  to  learn  that  he  grew  up 
to  be  an  eminently  respectable  citizen,  and  moved 
West !  But  the  paragraph  about  Joe  is  a  typical 
one. 

Hawthorne  was  thirty-four  years  old  that  sum 
mer,  and  for  a  dozen  years  had  devoted  himself, 
in  a  solitary  and  more  or  less  ineffective  way,  to 
the  art  of  fiction.  A  gentleman  who  well  remem 
bers  his  sojourn  at  the  North  Adams  House  says 
that  he  used  to  walk  along  the  street  with  his 
eyes  down,  and  that  he  presented  the  tavern- 
keeper's  niece  with  a  book  he  had  written.  This 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       129 

book,  published  the  year  before,  was  Twice- Told 
Tales.  In  Hawthorne's  well-known  criticism 
upon  these  stories,  written  many  years  afterward, 
he  accounted  for  their  negative  character  —  "  the 
pale  tint  of  flowers  that  blossomed  in  too  retired 
a  shade"  — by  his  way  of  life  while  composing 
them.  It  had  been  a  hermit  life,  a  life  of  shadows, 
yet  now  and  then  of  almost  pathetic  grasping 
after  realities.  The  articles  in  Twice- Told  Tales 
which  pleased  the  author  best  were  those  elabo 
rate  exercises  in  description,  valuable  indeed  as 
illustration  of  the  accuracy  of  Hawthorne's  self- 
training  in  detailed  observation,  but  more  valua 
ble  as  evidences  of  his  struggle  to  turn  from  his 
air-drawn  fancies,  and  morbid  though  often  ex 
tremely  powerful  imaginings,  to  the  common 
sunshine,  the  trivial  sweet  realities  of  the  actual 
world. 

Now,  the  author  of  the  North  Adams  journal 
is  the  Hawthorne  of  the  Toll- Gatherer's  Day 
and  Little  Annie's  Ramble,  rather  than  the  Haw 
thorne  of  the  Prophetic  Pictures  and  Fancy's 
Show  Box.  He  turns  eagerly  to  the  life  about 
him  ;  he  notes  its  details  with  fascinated  interest. 
Nothing  comes  amiss  to  him ;  the  long  valley  of 


130  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

the  Notch,  as  it  sweeps  up  to  the  Bellowspipe, 
and  a  grunting  drove  of  pigs  passing  the  tavern 
at  dusk,  are  alike  entered  in  his  note-book.  Fifty 
years  before  the  preface  to  Pierre  et  Jean  was 
written,  here  was  a  young  man  in  an  obscure 
corner  of  Massachusetts  practicing  a  "  theory  of 
observation  "  which  would  have  satisfied  De  Mau 
passant  himself.  The  extraordinary  precision  of 
Hawthorne's  descriptions  thus  early  in  his  career 
can  be  fully  appreciated  only  by  one  who  discovers 
how  a  mere  line  from  the  Note-Books  will  to-day 
serve,  with  the  older  citizens  of  North  Adams,  to 
identify  the  village  characters  sketched  therein ; 
or  by  one  who  will  stand,  with  Hawthorne's 
words  before  him,  by  the  side  of  Hudson's  Brook, 
or  on  the  desolate  summit  of  Bald  Mountain,  or 
at  that  point  on  the  Notch  road  where  there  is  a 
view  of  Williamstown,  "  with  high,  mountainous 
swells  heaving  themselves  up,  like  immense  sub 
siding  waves,  far  and  wide  around  it." 

There  was  a  reason  for  this  passion  for  the 
outer  world.  Solitude  had  done  its  utmost  for 
Hawthorne,  at  least  for  the  time  being,  and  he 
had  come  to  a  parting  of  the  ways.  A  single 
sentence  from  a  letter  to  an  intimate  friend  in 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       131 

1838  is  like  a  cry  from  the  man's  inmost  soul,  — 
"  I  want  to  have  something  to  do  with  the  material 
world."  Wedged  in  between  Otis  Hodge  and 
Orrin  Witherell  around  the  huge  fire  in  the  pub 
lic  room  of  the  Whig  Tavern,  his  elbows  touching 
those  stout-built,  cheery-souled  embodiments  of 
pioneer  virtues  and  vices,  and  casting  himself 
into  the  life  of  the  village  in  all  its  varied  activi 
ties,  Hawthorne  found  the  "  material  world  "  with 
which  he  longed  to  come  in  touch.  When  he  left 
North  Adams,  it  was  to  enter  almost  at  once  upon 
the  life  of  a  weigher  and  gauger  in  the  Boston 
Custom  House,  and  to  stand  thenceforth  in  the 
ranks  with  his  fellow-men. 

But  Hawthorne's  new  contact  with  actualities 
was  something  more  than  a  mere  quickening  of 
interests,  a  broadening  of  his  range,  a  closer  fo 
cusing  of  his  professional  eye  upon  the  object. 
He  was  a  writer  ;  he  had  the  passion  for  observ 
ing,  recording,recombining  ;  he  could  not  help  it. 
It  may  well  be  that  when  such  a  man  throws  him 
self  upon  the  actual,  the  result  is  simply  a  keener 
physical  vision,  a  more  perfect  analysis,  a  more 
pitiless  art.  This  fate  was  quite  possible  for 
Hawthorne.  The  fear  of  it  haunted  him,  and 


132  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

never  more  so  than  in  this  very  year  when  he 
made  his  escape  from  it.  He  wrote  to  Longfel 
low,  "  There  is  no  fate  in  this  world  so  horrible 
as  to  have  no  share  in  its  joys  and  sorrows."  To 
the  mere  observer  as  well  as  to  the  mere  dreamer 
—  and  Hawthorne  had  been  both  by  turns  — 
may  come  that  paralysis  which  lays  hold  of  the 
very  roots  of  life  and  art  together ;  which  begins 
in  artistic  detachment,  and  ends  in  the  sterility 
of  isolation.  From  the  horror  of  that  death  in 
life,  which  has  fallen  in  our  day  upon  artists  like 
Flaubert  and  his  more  brilliant  nephew,  Haw 
thorne  was  saved,  as  he  believed,  by  the  influence 
of  the  woman  who  afterward  became  his  wife. 
In  his  own  simple  phrase,  his  heart  was  touched. 
"  I  used  to  think  I  could  imagine  all  passions,  all 
feelings  and  states  of  the  heart  and  mind,  but 
how  little  did  I  know  !  Indeed,  we  are  but  shad 
ows  ;  we  are  not  endowed  with  real  life  ;  and  all 
that  seems  most  real  about  us  is  but  the  thinnest 
substance  of  a  dream  till  the  heart  be  touched. 
That  touch  creates  us  ;  then  we  begin  to  be  ; 
thereby  we  are  beings  of  reality  and  inheritors  of 
eternity." 

Hawthorne  had  already  felt  that  creative  touch 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       133 

in  the  summer  of  1838.  It  accounts  —  does  it 
not  ?  —  for  the  new  sense  of  reality  so  apparent 
in  the  journal.  It  was  not  simply  his  artistic 
interest,  but  his  sympathy,  that  started  into  a 
quicker  life.  His  extraordinarily  sensitive  mind 
brooded  upon  the  risk  he  had  run  of  becoming  a 
cool  observer,  untaught  that  he  had  a  heart ;  it 
became,  in  his  own  words,  "  a  fearful  thought  " 
to  him,  and,  being  an  artist  to  the  finger-tips,  he 
put  his  fearful  thought  into  artistic  form.  In 
Ethan  JBrand,t}ie  story  of  the  man  who  committed 
the  Unpardonable  Sin,  Hawthorne  embodied  not 
only  his  North  Adams  character  studies,  but  the 
very  emotion  that  must  have  stirred  his  deepest 
heart  during  those  weeks  of  sojourn  at  the  Whig 
Tavern.  He  laid  upon  the  shoulders  of  the  lime- 
burner  on  the  slope  of  Hoosac  the  awful  burden 
whose  weight  he  himself  had  almost  felt. 

Ethan  Brand,  a  Chapter  from  an  Abortive 
Romance,  was  first  published  in  the  Dollar  Maga 
zine  under  the  title  of  The  Unpardonable  Sin,  in 
1851.  The  date  of  its  composition  is  uncertain. 
Mr.  Lathrop  thinks  that  Hawthorne's  removal  to 
Berkshire  in  1850  may  have  revived  his  interest 
in  the  old  material  provided  by  the  Note-Books  ; 


134  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

Mr.  Conway  is  inclined  to  believe  that  the  story 
was  written  in  1848.  Nor  is  it  clear  how  literally 
the  subtitle  is  to  be  taken.  There  are  allusions 
in  Ethan  Brand  to  preceding  episodes  connected 
with  the  theme,  of  such  dramatic  possibilities 
that  Hawthorne  may  well  have  sketched  them  in 
his  fancy,  but  whether  he  ever  seriously  tried  his 
hand  upon  anything  more  than  the  culminating 
chapter  is  doubtful.  Two  things,  however,  are 
certain :  for  the  setting  of  the  story,  its  author 
drew  exclusively  upon  notes  taken  in  North 
Adams;  and  the  moral  problem  involved  in  it 
was  Hawthorne's  own  problem,  as  a  man  and  an 
artist,  in  the  summer  of  1838.  Remembering 
how  long  he  brooded  over  the  Septimius  Felton 
theme  and  the  Scarlet  Letter  theme  before  writ 
ing  a  word,  it  will  not  seem  improbable  that  the 
conception  of  Ethan  Brand  should  date  from 
the  time  of  his  first  visit  to  Berkshire,  even  if  the 
story  remained  unwritten  for  a  dozen  years; 
though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  not  at  all  un 
likely  that  its  composition  is  to  be  placed  much 
earlier  than  the  critics  have  surmised. 

Ostensibly  a  fragment,  and  undoubtedly  bear 
ing  internal  evidence  of  some  haste  or  dissatis- 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       135 

faction  on  the  author's  part,  Ethan  Brand  remains 
one  of  the  most  powerful  things  that  Hawthorne 
ever  wrote.  Rarely  has  he  shown  such  dramatic 
instinct  as  when  he  marshaled  his  old  North 
Adams  acquaintances  into  the  moonshine  and 
narrow  streaks  of  firelight  that  illuminated  the 
open  space  before  the  lime-kiln  on  the  sombre 
mountain  side.  They  are  all  there :  the  stage 
agent,  the  crippled  soap-boiler,  the  brandy-pos 
sessed  doctor,  the  old  man  whose  daughter  had 
wandered  away  with  the  circus,  the  German  Jew 
with  his  diorama,  and  the  curious  old  dog.  It  is 
little  Joe  who  guides  them  into  the  presence  of 
their  former  associate,  Ethan  Brand,  who  has 
committed  "  the  one  only  crime  for  which  Heaven 
can  afford  no  mercy."  Many  notes  from  the 
journal  are  adopted  without  change.  Sometimes 
there  is  a  mere  shifting  of  descriptive  phrases 
that  seem  to  suit  Hawthorne's  fancy ;  as  when 
the  "  wild  and  ruined  and  desperate  talk  "  attri 
buted  in  the  Note-Books  to  the  cripple  is  here 
given  to  the  doctor  ;  or  the  sentence  "  Earth  was 
so  mingled  with  sky  that  it  was  a  day-dream  to 
look  at  it,"  originally  written  of  Williamstown, 
is  applied  to  the  village  of  the  tale.  But  there 


136  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

are  more  subtle  adaptations  of  his  material  in 
two  allusions  to  events  not  narrated  in  the  story 
itself,  however  definitely  Hawthorne  may  have 
outlined  them  in  his  imagination.  The  old  man's 
missing  daughter  has  become  "  the  Esther  of  our 
tale,"  "  whom  with  such  cold  and  remorseless  pur 
pose  Ethan  Brand  had  made  the  subject  of  a 
psychological  experiment."  Eeference  is  also 
made  to  "  a  professional  visit  of  the  village  doctor 
to  Ethan  Brand,  during  the  latter's  supposed 
insanity."  Hawthorne  has  perhaps  wrought  out 
the  psychological  experiment  motive  often  enough 
elsewhere  to  indicate  what  would  probably  have 
been  his  method  here ;  but  the  idea  of  bringing 
"  Doctor  Bob,"  with  his  huge  animalism  and 
mordant  humor,  "  savage  as  a  wild  beast  and 
miserable  as  a  lost  soul,"  to  minister  to  the  spir 
itual  malady  that  preyed  upon  Ethan  Brand,  might 
easily  have  resulted  in  a  scene  unmatched  in  the 
whole  range  of  Hawthorne's  work. 

If  it  is  a  pure  bit  of  romanticism  to  transform 
the  Jew  of  Hoosac  Mountain  to  "  the  Jew  of 
Nuremberg,"  the  mask  of  the  fiend  himself,  there 
is,  on  the  other  hand,  in  the  description  of  the 
antics  of  the  old  dog  an  instance  of  the  power  of 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       137 

Hawthorne's  realism.  In  the  Note-Books,  the 
trivial  incident  of  the  dog's  chasing  his  own  tail 
is  minutely  narrated,  as  a  fact  somehow  worth 
recording.  In  Ethan  Brand,  the  fact  is  nothing 
except  as  it  illustrates  a  truth :  the  man  who  had 
chased  the  world  over  for  something  that  was  in 
his  own  breast,  "  moved  by  a  perception  of  some 
remote  analogy  between  his  own  case  and  that  of 
the  self -pursuing  cur,"  broke  into  the  awful  laugh 
that  sent  the  jovial  party  hurrying  homewards 
through  the  darkening  woods. 

For  Ethan  Brand  himself  there  is  no  model  in 
the  journal.  None  was  needed.  Hawthorne's  own 
problem,  in  that  critical  year,  was  to  keep  "  the 
counterpoise  between  his  mind  and  heart."  The 
doom  he  dreaded  most  of  all  was,  to  be  "  no  longer 
a  brother  man,  opening  the  chambers  or  the  dun 
geons  of  our  common  nature  by  the  key  of  holy 
sympathy,  which  gave  him  a  right  to  share  in  all 
its  secrets,"  but  to  be,  like  Ethan  Brand,  "  a  cold 
observer,  looking  on  mankind  as  the  subject  of 
his  experiment."  The  scene  of  the  tale  is  the  very 
hillside  where  Hawthorne  wandered,  brooding 
over  the  isolation  that  kills  and  the  touch  that 
makes  alive.  Its  personages  are  the  people  that 


138  THE   AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

jostled  against  him  in  the  tavern.  But  Hawthorne 
found  Ethan  Brand  —  or  a  potential  Ethan  Brand 
—  in  his  own  heart.  He  believed  in  an  Unpar 
donable  Sin  ;  and  it  is  by  this  faith  in  the  reality 
of  the  moral  life,  after  all  is  said,  that  he  takes 
his  rank  as  an  artist.  He  chose  moral  problems, 
the  truths  of  the  human  heart,  and  made  them 
plastic ;  he  created,  not  abstract  types,  but  men 
and  women,  charging  them  with  spiritual  force ; 
and  the  result  is  that  Ethan  Brand,  with  his 
homely  garments  and  heavy  shoes,  bending  over 
the  fiery  lime-kiln  on  the  slope  of  Hoosac,  is  a 
figure  with  all  the  moral  passion,  the  tragic  dig 
nity,  of  Empedocles  of  old  casting  himself  despair 
ingly  into  the  crater  of  Mount  Etna. 

It  is  more  than  fifty  years  since  Hawthorne 
left  the  village  at  the  foot  of  Greylock,  never  to 
return.  Most  of  the  companions  of  his  sojourn 
there  lie  buried  in  the  cone-shaped  sand-hills  of 
the  crowded  cemetery  just  beyond  the  Little 
Tunnel.  The  Whig  Tavern  changed  hands  shortly 
after  his  departure ;  and  although  Orrin  Smith 
later  kept  another  hostelry  by  the  side  of  the  old 
coaching  road  on  the  crest  of  Hoosac,  that,  too, 
has  long  since  disappeared,  and  the  site  is  over- 


HAWTHORNE  AT  NORTH  ADAMS       139 

grown  with  alders.  But  within  ten  minutes'  walk 
of  the  Tunnel  City  may  still  be  seen  a  gray  lime 
kiln  upon  which  Hawthorne's  eyes  have  rested, 
and  the  intense  personal  emotion  of  that  long-past 
year  is  still  vibrant  in  Ethan  Brand.  The  ro 
mance-writers  of  our  day  have  learned  to  stray 
far  afield  in  their  search  for  material,  and  they 
come  back,  too  often,  with  such  empty  hands ! 
The  more  's  the  pity,  since  a  factory  village,  set  in 
a  narrow  space  among  New  England  hills,  was 
once  field  enough  for  a  Hawthorne. 


FISHING  WITH  A  WOKM 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM. 

"  The  last  fish  I  caught  was  with  a  worm."  —  IZAAK 
WALTON. 

A  DEFECTIVE  logic  is  the  born  fisherman's  por 
tion.  He  is  a  pattern  of  inconsistency.  He  does 
the  things  which  he  ought  not  to  do,  and  he  leaves 
undone  the  things  which  other  people  think  he 
ought  to  do.  He  observes  the  wind  when  he 
should  be  sowing,  and  he  regards  the  clouds,  with 
tempation  tugging  familiarly  at  his  heartstrings, 
when  he  might  be  grasping  the  useful  sickle.  It 
is  a  wonder  that  there  is  so  much  health  in  him. 
A  sorrowing  political  economist  remarked  to  me 
in  early  boyhood,  as  a  jolly  red-bearded  neighbor, 
followed  by  an  abnormally  fat  dog,  sauntered 
past  us  for  his  nooning :  "  That  man  is  the  best 
carpenter  in  town,  but  he  will  leave  the  most 
important  job  whenever  he  wants  to  go  fishing." 
I  stared  at  the  sinful  carpenter,  who  swung  along 
leisurely  in  the  May  sunshine,  keeping  just  ahead 
of  his  dog.  To  leave  one's  job  in  order  to  go 
fishing !  How  illogical ! 


144  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

Years  bring  the  reconciling  mind.  The  world 
grows  big  enough  to  include  within  its  scheme 
both  the  instructive  political  economist  and  the 
truant  mechanic.  But  that  trick  of  truly  logical 
behavior  seems  harder  to  the  man  than  to  the 
child.  For  example,  I  climbed  up  to  my  den 
under  the  eaves  last  night  —  a  sour,  black  sea- 
fog  lying  all  about,  and  the  December  sleet  crack 
ling  against  the  window-panes  —  in  order  to 
varnish  a  certain  fly-rod.  Now  rods  ought  to  be 
put  in  order  in  September,  when  the  fishing  closes, 
or  else  in  April,  when  it  opens.  To  varnish  a  rod 
in  December  proves  that  one  possesses  either  a 
dilatory  or  a  childishly  anticipatory  mind.  But 
before  uncorking  the  varnish  bottle,  it  occurred 
to  me  to  examine  a  dog-eared,  water-stained 
fly-book,  to  guard  against  the  ravages  of  pos 
sible  moths.  This  interlude  proved  fatal  to  the 
varnishing.  A  half  hour  went  happily  by  in 
rearranging  the  flies.  Then,  with  a  fisherman's 
lack  of  sequence,  as  I  picked  out  here  and  there 
a  plain  snell-hook  from  the  gaudy  feathered 
ones,  I  said  to  myself  with  a  generous  glow  at 
the  heart :  "  Fly-fishing  has  had  enough  sacred 
poets  celebrating  it  already.  Is  n't  there  a  good 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  145 

deal  to  be  said,  after  all,  for  fishing  with  a 
worm  ?  " 

Could  there  be  a  more  illogical  proceeding? 
And  here  follows  the  treatise,  —  a  Defense  of 
Eesults,  an  Apology  for  Opportunism,  —  con 
ceived  in  agreeable  procrastination,  devoted  to 
the  praise  of  the  inconsequential  angleworm,  and 
dedicated  to  a  childish  memory  of  a  whistling 
carpenter  and  his  fat  dog. 

Let  us  face  the  worst  at  the  very  beginning. 
It  shall  be  a  shameless  example  of  fishing  under 
conditions  that  make  the  fly  a  mockery.  Take 
the  Taylor  Brook,  "between  the  roads,"  on  the 
headwaters  of  the  Lamoille.  The  place  is  a  jun 
gle.  The  swamp  maples  and  cedars  were  felled  a 
generation  ago,  and  the  tops  were  trimmed  into 
the  brook.  The  alders  and  moosewood  are  higher 
than  your  head  ;  on  every  tiny  knoll  the  fir  bal 
sams  have  gained  a  footing,  and  creep  down,  im 
penetrable,  to  the  edge  of  the  water.  In  the  open 
spaces  the  Joe-Pye  weed  swarms.  In  two  minutes 
after  leaving  the  upper  road  you  have  scared  a 
mink  or  a  rabbit,  and  you  have  probably  lost  the 
brook.  Listen  !  It  is  only  a  gurgle  here,  droning 
along,  smooth  and  dark,  under  the  tangle  of  cedar- 


146  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

tops  and  the  shadow  of  the  balsams.  Follow  the 
sound  cautiously.  There,  beyond  the  Joe-Pye 
weed,  and  between  the  stump  and  the  cedar-top, 
is  a  hand's  breadth  of  black  water.  Fly-casting 
is  impossible  in  this  maze  of  dead  and  living 
branches.  Shorten  your  line  to  two  feet,  or  even 
less,  bait  your  hook  with  a  worm,  and  drop  it 
gingerly  into  that  gurgling  crevice  of  water.  Be 
fore  it  has  sunk  six  inches,  if  there  is  not  one 
of  those  black-backed,  orange-bellied,  Taylor 
Brook  trout  fighting  with  it,  something  is  wrong 
with  your  worm  or  with  you.  For  the  trout  are 
always  there,  sheltered  by  the  brushwood  that 
makes  this  half  mile  of  fishing  "  not  worth  while." 
Below  the  lower  road  the  Taylor  Brook  becomes 
uncertain  water.  For  half  a  mile  it  yields  only 
fiugerlings,  for  no  explainable  reason  ;  then  there 
are  two  miles  of  clean  fishing  through  the  deep 
woods,  where  the  branches  are  so  high  that  you 
can  cast  a  fly  again  if  you  like,  and  there  are 
long  pools,  where  now  and  then  a  heavy  fish  will 
rise;  then  comes  a  final  half  mile  through  the 
alders,  where  you  must  wade,  knee  to  waist  deep, 
before  you  come  to  the  bridge  and  the  river. 
Glorious  fishing  is  sometimes  to  be  had  here,  — 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  147 

especially  if  you  work  down  the  gorge  at  twi 
light,  casting  a  white  miller  until  it  is  too  dark 
to  see.  But  alas,  there  is  a  well-worn  path  along 
the  brook,  and  often  enough  there  are  the  very 
footprints  of  the  "  fellow  ahead  of  you,"  signs  as 
disheartening  to  the  fisherman  as  ever  were  the 
footprints  on  the  sand  to  Robinson  Crusoe. 

But  "  between  the  roads  "  it  is  "  too  much 
trouble  to  fish ;  "  and  there  lies  the  salvation  of 
the  humble  fisherman  who  disdains  not  to  use 
the  crawling  worm,  nor,  for  that  matter,  to  crawl 
himself,  if  need  be,  in  order  to  sneak  under  the 
boughs  of  some  overhanging  cedar  that  casts  a 
perpetual  shadow  upon  the  sleepy  brook.  Lying 
here  at  full  length,  with  no  elbow-room  to  manage 
the  rod,  you  must  occasionally  even  unjoint  your 
tip,  and  fish  with  that,  using  but  a  dozen  inches 
of  line,  and  not  letting  so  much  as  your  eyebrows 
show  above  the  bank.  Is  it  a  becoming  attitude 
for  a  middle-aged  citizen  of  the  world  ?  That  de 
pends  upon  how  the  fish  are  biting.  Holing  a  put 
looks  rather  ridiculous  also,  to  the  mere  observer, 
but  it  requires,  like  brook-fishing  with  a  tip  only, 
a  very  delicate  wrist,  perfect  tactile  sense,  and  a 
fine  disregard  of  appearances. 


148  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

There  are  some  fishermen  who  always  fish  as 
if  they  were  being  photographed.  The  Taylor 
Brook  "  between  the  roads  "  is  not  for  them.  To 
fish  it  at  all  is  back-breaking,  trouser-tearing 
work ;  to  see  it  thoroughly  fished  is  to  learn  new 
lessons  in  the  art  of  angling.  To  watch  R.,  for 
example,  steadily  filling  his  six-pound  creel  from 
that  unlikely  stream,  is  like  watching  Sargent 
paint  a  portrait.  K.  weighs  two  hundred  and  ten. 
Twenty  years  ago  he  was  a  famous  amateur 
pitcher,  and  among  his  present  avocations  are 
violin  playing,  which  is  good  for  the  wrist,  taxi 
dermy,  which  is  good  for  the  eye,  and  shooting 
woodcock,  which  before  the  days  of  the  new  Na 
ture  Study  used  to  be  thought  good  for  the  whole 
man.  R.  began  as  a  fly-fisherman,  but  by  dint  of 
passing  his  summers  near  brooks  where  fly-fishing 
is  impossible,  he  has  become  a  stout-hearted 
apologist  for  the  worm.  His  apparatus  is  most 
singular.  It  consists  of  a  very  long,  cheap  rod, 
stout  enough  to  smash  through  bushes,  and  with 
the  stiffest  tip  obtainable.  The  lower  end  of  the 
butt,  below  the  reel,  fits  into  the  socket  of  a  huge 
extra  butt  of  bamboo,  which  R.  carries  uncon 
cernedly.  To  reach  a  distant  hole,  or  to  fish  the 


FISHING  WITH  A   WORM  149 

lower  end  of  a  ripple,  R.  simply  locks  his  reel, 
slips  on  the  extra  butt,  and  there  is  a  fourteen- 
foot  rod  ready  for  action.  He  fishes  with  a  line 
unbelievably  short,  and  a  Kendal  hook  far  too 
big ;  and  when  a  trout  jumps  for  that  hook,  R. 
wastes  no  time  in  manoauvring  for  position.  The 
unlucky  fish  is  simply  "  derricked,"  — to  borrow 
a  word  from  Theodore,  most  saturnine  and  pro 
fane  of  Moosehead  guides. 

"  Shall  I  play  him  awhile  ?  "  shouted  an  excited 
sportsman  to  Theodore,  after  hooking  his  first 
big  trout. 

" no!  "growled  Theodore  in  disgust.  "Just 

derrick  him  right  into  the  canoe!  "  A  heroic 
method,  surely ;  though  it  once  cost  me  the  best 
square-tail  I  ever  hooked,  for  Theodore  had  for 
gotten  the  landing-net,  and  the  gut  broke  in  his 
fingers  as  he  tried  to  swing  the  fish  aboard.  But 
with  these  lively  quarter-pounders  of  the  Taylor 
Brook,  derricking  is  a  safer  procedure.  Indeed, 
I  have  sat  dejectedly  on  the  far  end  of  a  log, 
after  fishing  the  hole  under  it  in  vain,  and  seen 
the  mighty  R.  wade  downstream  close  behind  me, 
adjust  that  comical  extra  butt,  and  jerk  a  couple 
of  half-pound  trout  from  under  the  very  log  on 


150  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

which  I  was  sitting.  His  device  on  this  occasion, 
as  I  well  remember,  was  to  pass  his  hook  but 
once  through  the  middle  of  a  big  worm,  let  the 
worm  sink  to  the  bottom,  and  crawl  along  it  at 
his  leisure.  The  trout  could  not  resist. 

Once,  and  once  only,  have  I  come  near  equal 
ing  K.'s  record,  and  the  way  he  beat  me  then  is 
the  justification  for  a  whole  philosophy  of  worm- 
fishing.  We  were  on  this  very  Taylor  Brook,  and 
at  five  in  the  afternoon  both  baskets  were  two 
thirds  full.  By  count  I  had  just  one  more  fish 
than  he.  It  was  raining  hard.  "  You  fish  down 
through  the  alders,"  said  E.  magnanimously. 
"  I  '11  cut  across  and  wait  for  you  at  the  sawmill. 
I  don't  want  to  get  any  wetter,  on  account  of  my 
rheumatism." 

This  was  rather  barefaced  kindness,  —  for 
whose  rheumatism  was  ever  the  worse  for  an 
other  hour's  fishing  ?  But  I  weakly  accepted  it. 
I  coveted  three  or  four  good  trout  to  top  off  with, 
—  that  was  all.  So  I  tied  on  a  couple  of  flies, 
and  began  to  fish  the  alders,  wading  waist  deep 
in  the  rapidly  rising  water,  down  the  long  green 
tunnel  under  the  curving  boughs.  The  brook 
fairly  smoked  with  the  rain,  by  this  time,  but 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  151 

when  did  one  fail  to  get  at  least  three  or  four 
trout  out  of  this  best  half  mile  of  the  lower  brook  ? 
Yet  I  had  no  luck.  I  tried  one  fly  after  another, 
and  then,  as  a  forlorn  hope,  —  though  it  some 
times  has  a  magic  of  its  own, —  I  combined  a 
brown  hackle  for  the  tail  fly  with  a  twisting  worm 
on  the  dropper.  Not  a  rise !  I  thought  of  R. 
sitting  patiently  in  the  saw  mill,  and  I  fished 
more  conscientiously  than  ever. 

"  Venture  as  warily,  use  the  same  skill, 
Do  your  best,  whether  winning  or  losing  it, 
If  you  choose  to  play  !  —  is  my  principle." 

Even  those  lines,  which  by  some  subtle  telepathy 
of  the  trout  brook  murmur  themselves  over  and 
over  to  me  in  the  waning  hours  of  an  unlucky 
day,  brought  now  no  consolation.  There  was  sim 
ply  not  one  fish  to  be  had,  to  any  fly  in  the  book, 
out  of  that  long,  drenching,  darkening  tunnel. 
At  last  I  climbed  out  of  the  brook,  by  the  bridge. 
E.  was  sitting  on  the  fence,  his  neck  and  ears 
carefully  turtled  under  his  coat  collar,  the  smoke 
rising  and  the  rain  dripping  from  the  inverted 
bowl  of  his  pipe.  He  did  not  seem  to  be  worrying 
about  his  rheumatism. 

"What  luck?"  he  asked. 


152  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

"  None  at  all,"  I  answered  morosely.  "  Sorry 
to  keep  you  waiting." 

"  That 's  all  right,"  remarked  K.  "  What  do 
you  think  I  Ve  been  doing  ?  I  've  been  fishing 
out  of  the  saw-mill  window  just  to  kill  time. 
There  was  a  patch  of  floating  sawdust  there,  — 
kind  of  unlikely  place  for  trout,  anyway,  —  but  I 
thought  I'd  put  on  a  worm  and  let  him  crawl 
around  a  little."  He  opened  his  creel  as  he  spoke. 

"  But  I  did  n't  look  for  a  pair  of  'em,"  he  added. 
And  there,  on  top  of  his  smaller  fish,  were  as 
pretty  a  pair  of  three-quarter-pound  brook  trout 
as  were  ever  basketed. 

"I'm  afraid  you  got  pretty  wet,"  said  E. 
kindly. 

"  I  don't  mind  that,"  I  replied.  And  I  did  n't. 
"What  I  minded  was  the  thought  of  an  hour's  vain 
wading  in  that  roaring  stream,  whipping  it  with  fly 
after  fly,  while  K.,  the  foreordained  fisherman, 
was  sitting  comfortably  in  a  sawmill,  and  der- 
ricking  that  pair  of  three-quarter-pounders  in 
through  the  window  !  I  had  ventured  more  warily 
than  he,  and  used,  if  not  the  same  skill,  at  least 
the  best  skill  at  my  command.  My  conscience 
was  clear,  but  so  was  his ;  and  he  had  had  the 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  153 

drier  skin  and  the  greater  magnanimity  and  the 
biggest  fish  besides.  There  is  much  to  be  said,  in 
a  world  like  ours,  for  taking  the  world  as  you  find 
it  and  for  fishing  with  a  worm. 

One's  memories  of  such  fishing,  however  agree 
able  they  may  be,  are  not  to  be  identified  with  a 
defense  of  the  practice.  Yet,  after  all,  the  most 
effective  defense  of  worm-fishing  is  the  concrete  re 
collection  of  some  brook  that  could  be  fished  best 
or  only  in  that  way,  or  the  image  of  a  particular 
trout  that  yielded  to  the  temptation  of  an  angle 
worm  after  you  had  flicked  fly  after  fly  over  him 
in  vain.  Indeed,  half  the  zest  of  brook  fishing  is 
in  your  campaign  for  "  individuals,"  —  as  the 
Salvation  Army  workers  say,  —  not  merely  for  a 
basketful  of  fish  qua  fish,  but  for  a  series  of  indi 
vidual  trout  which  your  instinct  tells  you  ought 
to  lurk  under  that  log  or  be  hovering  in  that  rip 
ple.  How  to  get  him,  by  some  sportsmanlike  pro 
cess,  is  the  question.  If  he  will  rise  to  some  fly 
in  your  book,  few  fishermen  will  deny  that  the 
fly  is  the  more  pleasurable  weapon.  Dainty,  lur 
ing,  beautiful  toy,  light  as  thistle-down,  falling 
where  you  will  it  to  fall,  holding  when  the  leader 


154  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

tightens  and  sings  like  the  string  of  a  violin,  the 
artificial  fly  represents  the  poetry  of  angling. 
Given  the  gleam  of  early  morning  on  some  wide 
water,  a  heavy  trout  breaking  the  surface  as  he 
curves  and  plunges,  with  the  fly  holding  well, 
with  the  right  sort  of  rod  in  your  fingers,  and  the 
right  man  in  the  other  end  of  the  canoe,  and  you 
perceive  how  easy  is  that  Emersonian  trick  of 
making  the  pomp  of  emperors  ridiculous. 

But  angling's  honest  prose,  as  represented  by 
the  lowly  worm,  has  also  its  exalted  moments. 
"  The  last  fish  I  caught  was  with  a  worm,"  says 
the  honest  Walton,  and  so  say  I.  It  was  the  last 
evening  of  last  August.  The  dusk  was  settling 
deep  upon  a  tiny  meadow,  scarcely  ten  rods  from 
end  to  end.  The  rank  bog  grass,  already  drenched 
with  dew,  bent  over  the  narrow,  deep  little  brook 
so  closely  that  it  could  not  be  fished  except  with 
a  double-shotted,  baited  hook,  dropped  delicately 
between  the  heads  of  the  long  grasses.  Under 
neath  this  canopy  the  trout  were  feeding,  taking 
the  hook  with  a  straight  downward  tug,  as  they 
made  for  the  hidden  bank.  It  was  already  twi 
light  when  I  began,  and  before  I  reached  the 
black  belt  of  woods  that  separated  the  meadow 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  155 

from  the  lake,  the  swift  darkness  of  the  North 
Country  made  it  impossible  to  see  the  hook.  A 
short  half  hour's  fishing  only,  and  behold  nearly 
twenty  good  trout  derrieked  into  a  basket  until 
then  sadly  empty.  Your  rigorous  fly-fisherman 
would  have  passed  that  grass-hidden  brook  in 
disdain,  but  it  proved  a  treasure  for  the  humble. 
Here,  indeed,  there  was  no  question  of  individu 
ally-minded  fish,  but  simply  a  neglected  brook, 
full  of  trout  which  could  be  reached  with  the 
baited  hook  only.  In  more  open  brook-fishing  it 
is  always  a  fascinating  problem  to  decide  how  to 
fish  a  favorite  pool  or  ripple,  for  much  depends 
upon  the  hour  of  the  day,  the  light,  the  height  of 
water,  the  precise  period  of  the  spring  or  summer. 
But  after  one  has  decided  upon  the  best  theoreti 
cal  procedure,  how  often  the  stupid  trout  prefers 
some  other  plan !  And  when  you  have  missed  a  fish 
that  you  counted  upon  landing,  what  solid  satis 
faction  is  still  possible  for  you,  if  you  are  philoso 
pher  enough  to  sit  down  then  and  there,  eat  your 
lunch,  smoke  a  meditative  pipe,  and  devise  a  new 
campaign  against  that  particular  fish!  To  get 
another  rise  from  him  after  lunch  is  a  triumph  of 
diplomacy  ;  to  land  him  is  nothing  short  of  states- 


156  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

manship.  For  sometimes  he  will  jump  furiously 
at  a  fly,  for  very  devilishness,  without  ever  mean 
ing  to  take  it,  and  then,  wearying  suddenly  of 
his  gymnastics,  he  will  snatch  sulkily  at  a  grass 
hopper,  beetle,  or  worm.  Trout  feed  upon  an 
extraordinary  variety  of  crawling  things,  as  all 
fishermen  know  who  practice  the  useful  habit  of 
opening  the  first  two  or  three  fish  they  catch,  to 
see  what  food  is  that  day  the  favorite.  But  here, 
as  elsewhere  in  this  world,  the  best  things  lie 
nearest,  and  there  is  no  bait  so  killing,  week  in 
and  week  out,  as  your  plain  garden  or  golf -green 
angleworm. 

Walton's  list  of  possible  worms  is  impressive, 
and  his  directions  for  placing  them  upon  the 
hook  have  the  placid  completeness  that  belonged 
to  his  character.  Yet  in  such  matters  a  little  non 
conformity  may  be  encouraged.  No  two  men  or 
boys  dig  bait  in  quite  the  same  way,  though  all 
share,  no  doubt,  the  singular  elation  which  gilds 
that  grimy  occupation  with  the  spirit  of  romance. 
The  mind  is  really  occupied,  not  with  the  wrig 
gling  red  creatures  in  the  lumps  of  earth,  but 
with  the  stout  fish  which  each  worm  may  capture, 
just  as  a  saint  might  rejoice  in  the  squalor  of  this 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  157 

world  as  a  preparation  for  the  glories  of  the  world 
to  come.  Nor  do  any  two  experienced  fishermen 
hold  quite  the  same  theory  as  to  the  best  mode  of 
baiting  the  hook.  There  are  a  hundred  ways, 
each  of  them  good.  As  to  the  best  hook  for 
worm-fishing,  you  will  find  dicta  in  every  cata 
logue  of  fishing  tackle,  but  size  and  shape  and 
tempering  are  qualities  that  should  vary  with  the 
brook,  the  season,  and  the  fisherman.  Should 
one  use  a  three-foot  leader,  or  none  at  all  ?  Whose 
rods  are  best  for  bait-fishing,  granted  that  all  of 
them  should  be  stiff  enough  in  the  tip  to  lift  a 
good  fish  by  dead  strain  from  a  tangle  of  brush 
or  logs  ?  Such  questions,  like  those  pertaining  to 
the  boots  or  coat  which  one  should  wear,  the  style 
of  bait-box  one  should  carry,  or  the  brand  of  to 
bacco  best  suited  for  smoking  in  the  wind,  are 
topics  for  unending  discussion  among  the  serious 
minded  around  the  camp-fire.  Much  edification 
is  in  them,  and  yet  they  are  but  prudential  max 
ims  after  all.  They  are  mere  moralities  of  the 
Franklin  or  Chesterfield  variety,  counsels  of 
worldly  wisdom,  but  they  leave  the  soul  untouched. 
A  man  may  have  them  at  his  finger's  ends  and 
be  no  better  fisherman  at  bottom;  or  he  may, 


158  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

like  R.,  ignore  most  of  the  admitted  rules  and 
come  home  with  a  full  basket.  It  is  a  sufficient 
defense  of  fishing  with  a  worm  to  pronounce  the 
truism  that  no  man  is  a  complete  angler  until  he 
has  mastered  all  the  modes  of  angling.  Lovely 
streams,  lonely  and  enticing,  but  impossible  to 
fish  with  a  fly,  await  the  fisherman  who  is  not 
too  proud  to  use,  with  a  man's  skill,  the  same 
unpretentious  tackle  which  he  began  with  as  a 
boy. 

But  ah,  to  fish  with  a  worm,  and  then  not  catch 
your  fish !  To  fail  with  a  fly  is  no  disgrace :  your 
art  may  have  been  impeccable,  your  patience 
faultless  to  the  end.  But  the  philosophy  of  worm- 
fishing  is  that  of  Results,  of  having  something 
tangible  in  your  basket  when  the  day's  work  is 
done.  It  is  a  plea  for  Compromise,  for  cutting 
the  coat  according  to  the  cloth,  for  taking  the 
world  as  it  actually  is.  The  fly-fisherman  is  a 
natural  Foe  of  Compromise.  He  throws  to  the 
trout  a  certain  kind  of  lure ;  an  they  will  take 
it,  so ;  if  not,  adieu.  He  knows  no  middle  path. 

"  This  high  man,  aiming  at  a  million, 
Misses  an  unit." 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  159 

The  raptures  and  the  tragedies  of  consistency 
are  his.  He  is  a  scorner  of  the  ground.  All  honor 
to  him !  When  he  comes  back  at  nightfall  and 
says  happily,  "  I  have  never  cast  a  line  more  per 
fectly  than  I  have  to-day,"  it  is  almost  indecent 
to  peek  into  his  creel.  It  is  like  rating  Colonel 
Newcome  by  his  bank  account. 

But  the  worm-fisherman  is  no  such  proud  and 
isolated  soul.  He  is  a  "  low  man  "  rather  than  a 
high  one  ;  he  honestly  cares  what  his  friends  will 
think  when  they  look  into  his  basket  to  see  what 
he  has  to  show  for  his  day's  sport.  He  watches 
the  Foe  of  Compromise  men  go  stumbling  forward 
and  superbly  falling,  while  he,  with  less  inflexible 
courage,  manages  to  keep  his  feet.  He  wants  to 
score,  and  not  merely  to  give  a  pretty  exhibition 
of  base-running.  At  the  Harvard- Yale  football 
game  of  1903  the  Harvard  team  showed  superior 
strength  in  rushing  the  ball ;  they  carried  it  almost 
to  the  Yale  goal  line  repeatedly,  but  they  could 
not,  for  some  reason,  take  it  over.  In  the  instant 
of  absolute  need,  the  Yale  line  held,  and  when 
the  Yale  team  had  to  score  in  order  to  win,  they 
scored.  As  the  crowd  streamed  out  of  the  Sta 
dium,  a  veteran  Harvard  alumnus  said  :  "  This 


160  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

news  will  cause  great  sorrow  in  one  home  I  know 
of,  until  they  learn  by  to-morrow's  papers  that 
the  Harvard  team  acquitted  itself  creditably" 
Exactly.  Given  one  team  bent  upon  acquitting 
itself  creditably,  and  another  team  determined  to 
win,  which  will  be  victorious  ?  The  stay-at-homes 
on  the  Yale  campus  that  day  were  not  curious  to 
know  whether  their  team  was  acquitting  itself 
creditably,  but  whether  it  was  winning  the  game. 
Every  other  question  than  that  was  to  those  young 
Philistines  merely  a  fine-spun  irrelevance.  They 
took  the  Cash  and  let  the  Credit  go. 

There  is  much  to  be  said,  no  doubt,  for  the 
Harvard  veteran's  point  of  view.  The  proper 
kind  of  credit  may  be  a  better  asset  for  eleven 
boys  than  any  championship  ;  and  to  fish  a  bit  of 
water  consistently  and  skillfully,  with  your  best 
flies  and  in  your  best  manner,  is  perhaps  achieve 
ment  enough.  So  says  the  Foe  of  Compromise, 
at  least.  But  the  Yale  spirit  will  be  prying  into 
the  basket  in  search  of  fish ;  it  prefers  concrete 
results.  If  all  men  are  by  nature  either  Plato- 
nists  or  Aristotelians,  fly -fishermen  or  worm-fish 
ermen,  how  difficult  it  is  for  us  to  do  one  another 
justice !  Differing  in  mind,  in  aim  and  method, 


FISHING  WITH  A  WORM  161 

how  shall  we  say  infallibly  that  this  man  or  that 
is  wrong  ?  To  fail  with  Plato  for  companion  may 
be  better  than  to  succeed  with  Aristotle.  But  one 
thing  is  perfectly  clear  :  there  is  no  warrant  for 
Compromise  but  in  Success.  Use  a  worm  if  you 
will,  but  you  must  have  fish  to  show  for  it,  if  you 
would  escape  the  finger  of  scorn.  If  you  find 
yourself  camping  by  an  unknown  brook,  and  are 
deputed  to  catch  the  necessary  trout  for  break 
fast,  it  is  wiser  to  choose  the  surest  bait.  The 
crackle  of  the  fish  in  the  frying-pan  will  atone 
for  any  theoretical  defect  in  your  method.  But 
to  choose  the  surest  bait,  and  then  to  bring  back 
no  fish,  is  unforgivable.  Forsake  Plato  if  you  must, 
—  but  you  may  do  so  only  at  the  price  of  justi 
fying  yourself  in  the  terms  of  Aristotelian  arith 
metic.  The  college  president  who  abandoned  his 
college  in  order  to  run  a  cotton  mill  was  free  to 
make  his  own  choice  of  a  calling ;  but  he  was 
never  pardoned  for  bankrupting  the  mill.  If  one 
is  bound  to  be  a  low  man  rather  than  an  impracti 
cal  idealist,  he  should  at  least  make  sure  of  his 
vulgar  success. 

Is  all  this  but  a  disguised  defense  of  pot-hunt 
ing?  No.   There  is  no  possible  defense  of  pot- 


162  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

hunting,  whether  it  be  upon  a  trout  brook  or  in 
the  stock  market.  Against  fish  or  men,  one  should 
play  the  game  fairly.  Yet  for  that  matter  some 
of  the  most  skillful  fly-fishermen  I  have  known 
were  pot-hunters  at  heart,  and  some  of  the  most 
prosaic  -  looking  merchants  were  idealists  com 
pared  to  whom  Shelley  was  but  a  dreaming  boy. 
All  depends  upon  the  spirit  with  which  one  makes 
his  venture.  I  recall  a  boy  of  five  who  gravely 
watched  his  father  tramp  off  after  rabbits,  —  gun 
on  shoulder  and  beagle  in  leash.  Thereupon  he 
shouldered  a  wooden  sword,  and  dragging  his 
reluctant  black  kitten  by  a  string,  sallied  forth 
upon  the  dusty  Vermont  road  "  to  get  a  lion  for 
breakfast."  That  is  the  true  sporting  temper ! 
Let  there  be  but  a  fine  idealism  in  the  quest,  and 
the  particular  object  is  unessential.  "  A  true  fish 
erman's  happiness,"  says  Mr.  Cleveland,  "  is  not 
dependent  upon  his  luck."  It  depends  upon  his 
heart. 

No  doubt  all  amateur  fishing  is  but  "  play,"  — 
as  the  psychologists  soberly  term  it :  not  a  neces 
sary,  but  a  freely  assumed  activity,  born  of  sur 
plusage  of  vitality.  Nobody,  not  even  a  carpenter 
wearied  of  his  job,  has  to  go  fishing  unless  he 


FISHING   WITH  A  WORM  163 

wants  to.  He  may  indeed  find  himself  breakfast- 
less  in  camp,  and  obliged  to  betake  himself  to  the 
brook,  —  but  then  he  need  not  have  gone  into  the 
woods  at  all.  Yet  if  he  does  decide  to  fish,  let 
him 

"  Venture  as  warily,  use  the  same  skill, 
Do  his  best,  ..." 

whatever  variety  of  tackle  he  may  choose.  He 
can  be  a  whole-souled  sportsman  with  the  poorest 
equipment,  or  a  mean  "  trout-hog  "  with  the  most 
elaborate. 

Only,  in  the  name  of  gentle  Izaak  himself,  let 
him  be  a  complete  angler ;  and  let  the  man  be  a 
passionate  amateur  of  all  the  arts  of  life,  despis 
ing  none  of  them,  and  using  all  of  them  for  his 
soul's  good  and  for  the  joy  of  his  fellows.  If  he 
be,  so  to  speak,  but  a  worm-fisherman,  —  a  fol 
lower  of  humble  occupations,  and  pledged  to  un- 
romantic  duties,  —  let  him  still  thrill  with  the 
pleasures  of  the  true  sportsman.  To  make  the 
most  of  dull  hours,  to  make  the  best  of  dull  peo 
ple,  to  like  a  poor  jest  better  than  none,  to  wear 
the  threadbare  coat  like  a  gentleman,  to  be  out 
voted  with  a  smile,  to  hitch  your  wagon  to  the  old 
horse  if  no  star  is  handy,  —  this  is  the  wholesome 


164  THE  AMATEUR  SPIRIT 

philosophy  taught  by  fishing  with  a  worm.  The 
fun  of  it  depends  upon  the  heart.  There  may  be 
as  much  zest  in  saving  as  in  spending,  in  working 
for  small  wages  as  for  great,  in  avoiding  the  snap 
shots  of  publicity  as  in  being  invariably  first 
"  among  those  present."  But  a  man  should  be 
honest.  If  he  catches  most  of  his  fish  with  a  worm, 
secures  the  larger  portion  of  his  success  by  com 
monplace  industry,  let  him  glory  in  it,  for  this, 
too,  is  part  of  the  great  game.  Yet  he  ought  not 
in  that  case  to  pose  as  a  fly-fisherman  only,  —  to 
carry  himself  as  one  aware  of  the  immortalizing 
camera,  —  to  pretend  that  life  is  easy,  if  one  but 
knows  how  to  drop  a  fly  into  the  right  ripple.  For 
life  is  not  easy,  after  all  is  said.  It  is  a  long 
brook  to  fish,  and  it  needs  a  stout  heart  and  a 
wise  patience.  All  the  flies  there  are  in  the  book, 
and  all  the  bait  that  can  be  carried  in  the  box, 
are  likely  to  be  needed  ere  the  day  is  over.  But, 
like  the  Psalmist's  "  river  of  God,"  this  brook  is 
"  full  of  water,"  and  there  is  plenty  of  good  fish 
ing  to  be  had  in  it  if  one  is  neither  afraid  nor 
ashamed  of  fishing  sometimes  with  a  worm. 


Electrotype*  and  printed  by  H.  O.  Hoitghton  &  Co. 
Cambridge,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


14  DAY  USE 

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